Chapters 7 & 8 of Opening Skinner's Box

This post brought to you by OxyContin

Chapter seven covered a really interesting topic, which is over addiction.  I have never had any sort of addiction to drugs, but one might argue a case for video game addiction.  In this chapter, Slater speaks to Dr. Bruce Alexander about the nature of addiction.  He conducted a series of studies on addiction, which worked to prove that addiction was caused more by the circumstances that a person was in, and less by the chemistry behind the drugs.  
In a very Lauren Slater fashion, she brought the situation onto a personal level, by bringing up her friend Emma (I hope this is a pseudonym, because I can just imagine the problems that a science dean of a college would have to endure because of being labeled in a book as a junkie).  This woman is 63 years old, and is addicted to the painkiller OxyContin.  I actually learned about OxyContin in my civil law class; it was cited as a lawsuit in the liability section.  OxyContin was being sued because their drug - when crushed into a powder before ingestion - was found to cause addiction.  The company claimed that people should not have been misusing the drug like that, but it was found that they knew this was a risk during drug testing, and just didn't tell the FDA about it.  However, in Emma's case, she seems to be addicted to the drug without crushing it into the powder to gain a quicker release.  
As for Alexander's research, the fact that it had never reached the mainstream kind of made it harder for me to take the research seriously.  If very few of the professionals in that field believed the experiment, I probably shouldn't either.  Even though the research was interesting, rats do not correspond to humans perfectly, and there is too much evidence pointing the the biological dependence for me to put all my faith into Alexander's research.

So it seems to me that as we progress through the book, the research presented in a given chapter becomes more obscure and more heavily criticized.  In chapter eight, we meet a person who I sort of feel sorry for.  Elizabeth Loftus has made many enemies with her research, which has not particularly gone anywhere.  Her personal life doesn't seem that great, and she has to stay ridiculously busy, presumably so that she doesn't have any time to think about how unhappy she might be.  It's almost like Harlow, except he thought that his life was bad when it really wasn't, and became an ass as a result.  
The experiment that this chapter focuses on was inspired as a result of the vast number of people that were accusing their parents of some sort of heinous act decades after the alleged perpetration.  She would select her subjects and have them read a booklet.  This booklet contained some childhood memories, as recorded by family of the subject, along with one false memory of being lost in the mall.  Her experiment found that 25% of subjects would create a memory of being lost in the mall, when in reality, they had never done any such thing.  The shocking thing is that the memory would have very vivid detail, as though it had just been created.  The shocking detail that the subjects recalled the event with should have tipped them off that perhaps something wasn't right.  I've been lost in the mall once or twice myself.  All I remember is that we were in one of the many department stores in the mall, and that my parents somehow got separated from me.  I might have been seven years old, and I could have been hiding in one of the circular coat racks, but I don't actually know, i'm just inferring that based on the fact that I used to do it a lot.  
The other experiment that Loftus performed was based on repressed memories.  She claimed that they actually do not exist, a fact that was received with much hostility from the psychological community.  How can you say that all these people who suffered a traumatic event never actually suffered this event.  Although, if we were able to convince people that they were never traumatized, perhaps they could be at peace once more.  Then again, that's probably the exact equivalent of memory repression, which kind of says to me that it is a thing, despite what Loftus says.