How free is free will?

Slightly more disturbing is the fact that at one point, Slater refers to "the woman who yelled 'whore' [at Elizabeth Loftus] in the airport a few years back." But as Salon's Laura Miller wrote in a recent Times Book Review column, the line is actually Slater's mischaracterization of this 1996 Psychology Today article, which begins (in reference to Loftus): "She has been called a whore by a prosecutor in a courthouse hallway, assaulted by a passenger on an airplane shouting, 'You're that woman!', and has occasionally required surveillance by plainclothes security guards at lectures." So Slater turned being called a whore in a courthouse to being called a whore in an airport; this can't be called very careful. Whether this kind of sloppiness indicates that she could have fabricated a quote, as Spitzer alleges, is harder to say.

Slater maintains that her notes show Robert Spitzer making the "that's what you get" statement about Rosenhan, but in a letter to Spitzer she wrote in February, she offered to remove that statement from future versions of the book as a way "to make you more comfortable with your appearance in the Rosenhan chapter." But she did not agree to change any other statements Spitzer has disputed. She closes the letter with this curious statement: "At root none of the statements you believe you didn't make are any kind of misrepresentation of you, even the statement about Rosenhan and his illness, given that your ire toward him and his 'study,' is quite well known."

And in response to Spitzer's demand that Slater more fully document her attempt to repeat Rosenhan's study, Slater called in the big guns -- her lawyer. In a letter to Spitzer, Slater's attorney not only declined to provide any details of Slater's visits to psych hospitals, he also threatened Spitzer with fines of $150,000 for distributing text of the book on the Internet. And this, it must be said, is a rather low move. Much of Slater's book is worth defending, but she should know that reaching for the cudgel of copyright law in an attempt to silence her critics doesn't make defending her any easier or more desirable.

It is distressing to have to spare so much space in a review of an interesting book to disentangle what's plainly true in it from what's less plainly so. Readers of Slater's book who are familiar with the controversy will feel a similar distress as they make it through her prose, wondering, from second to second, whether this or that bit of detail is fact or, instead, the author's carelessness at work. The distress might even be enough to prompt some of them to set the book aside: Why read a nonfiction work of popular psychology if you're not sure you're actually learning the truth?

But the truth is that most, if not all, of Slater's book is the truth. Even if you believe she got wrong everything that critics of her book have accused her of getting wrong, that's still not very much. This sounds like a thin assurance -- who wants to read a book that's mostly true? -- but really it's not. If Slater were to change every word that Spitzer and Loftus and the others want her to change, the book would have, at most, two or three pages' worth of alterations. Can you really dismiss a book on the basis of two or three slightly erroneous pages?

Not this book, let's say. "Opening Skinner's Box" should be read. It should be read, for one, because Slater is a gifted stylist and there is pleasure in the reading, but it should also be read because, despite any questions of accuracy, there will be pleasure in the substance of the book, too. Readers unfamiliar with all that occurred in psychology during the last century will find Slater's explorations especially interesting.

Take, for example, the work of John Darley and Bibb Latané, psychologists who devised a series of experiments to test why it is that people sometimes ignore other people's calls for help, and why, at other times, we will leap to others' comfort. Darley and Latané's experiments were inspired by the gruesome murder and rape of Kitty Genovese, a crime that took place over a 35-minute period in the predawn hours of March 13, 1964, in a working-class section of Queens, N.Y. Thirty-eight people witnessed the murder and rape, and nobody called the police for help while it was occurring. Thirty-eight people -- why were they all so heartless?

But they were not heartless, of course. They were human. In a series of experiments on New York University students, Darley and Latané discovered the phenomenon of "diffusion of responsibility" -- the more people who witness an event, Slater writes, "the less responsible any one individual feels and, indeed, is, because responsibility is evenly distributed among the crowd." Combined with social norms -- who wants to be the first one to make a fuss if nobody else seems to be too upset? -- diffusion of responsibility can paralyze a crowd. People witnessing a crime or any other kind of emergency will do nothing.

In fact, the psychology that leads to this paralysis can even prevent us from saving ourselves, Darley and Latané found. In one experiment, they put a naive subject into a room with three actors. They told all four to fill out a questionnaire on college life. After several minutes, the psychologists began to release a non-hazardous white smoke into room through an air vent. The three actors, who'd been instructed to act normally, continued filling out their forms. And what did the fourth person, the experiment's subject, do? "The smoke started pouring like cream, coming faster, heavier, smearing the air and blotting out figures, faces," Slater writes. "Each time, the subject looked alarmed, looked at the smoke going from wisp to waft, looked at the calm confederates, and then, clearly confused, went back to filling out the questionnaire." In the entire experiment, only four subjects ever reported the smoke -- everyone else stuck with the questionnaire, despite the "white film on the hair and on their lips."

Most of us would like to believe we're somehow above, or beyond, our psychology. We would have called the cops about the Genovese murder, though those 38 did not. We would have alerted the experimenters to the smoke in the room, though most others did not. We would not have electrocuted an innocent man just because an authority figure had instructed us to do so, as 65 percent of the people in Stanley Milgram's infamous Yale experiment, another that Slater writes about, simulated doing. But really, who are we kidding? "Opening Skinner's Box" asks us. We would not have called the cops about Kitty Genovese. And there are experiments to prove it.

So far, all that everyone talks about when they talk about "Opening Skinner's Box" are the shortcomings of Lauren Slater. These are, in a sense, important. But by the far the more interesting shortcomings illuminated in this book are not those of the author but of us all. They are the shortcomings in human nature, and they are worth reading about.

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