Chapters 5 & 6 of Opening Skinner's Box

Of Misconceptions and Monkeys(/Lies and Love)

Chapter five begins with a 1950s housewife deciding that the world was going to end soon.  Somehow, others decided that her story held water and formed a sort of cult.  When the fateful day arrived, all of a sudden, nothing happened.  Rather than decide that maybe they were wrong like a normal person, they conjured an explanation for why their prediction had not come to fruition.  This is cognitive dissonance, and it explains why it is so hard to convince some people that they are wrong.  More interesting, however, Slater visits Linda Santo, a mother of a rather remarkable comatose girl.  While reading this portion of the chapter, I was less interested in cognitive dissonance and more interested in whether or not this stuff is for real.  So, I looked it up in the ultimate authority, Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has a more skeptical approach to the story, and explains away a number of facts, but doesn't give a comprehensive list of her "miracles", so I won't say %100 whether or not this is dumb.

The other part of the story had to do with Harry Harlow.  For starters, I don't really like this guy.  He sounds like an asshole with a problem with alcoholism and fidelity.  Nevertheless, the research he did is fascinating and changed the face of child-rearing in America, which was laughable at the time ("send your child to bed with a smile and a handshake, not a hug").  He pretty much tried every variation of this experiment, including the cruel and pointless part where he tried to make socially deprived monkeys raise children.  Instead they killed or ignored their young, which nobody can genuinely be surprised about.