Book Reading #10: Opening Skinner's Box

Reference:
Opening Skinner's Box
Lauren Slater
2004 W. W. Norton & Company

Summary:
In 1961, Dr. Stanley Milgram performed a study of obedience.  He recruited test subjects by telling them they were participating in a study of learning, then had them quiz the "learners" while administering electric shocks for incorrect answers.  Even though the learners appeared to become more and more agitated as the electric shocks became more and more powerful, 65% of the test subjects would continue to administer the shocks based on the orders they were given.  While the data collected showed that some groups were somewhat more likely to continue administering the shocks, there were no conclusive findings in the data.

Discussion:
While the implications of this study are fascinating, I feel I must address some of the presumptuous statements that the author made.  First of all, it came as a shock to find that since my father works for Exxon, he is a bad man.  I grant that she didn't make any explicit statements on the sinister nature of Big Oil, but when considering how she repeatedly stated how she was surprised how the defiant individual worked for Exxon, I think my analysis is sound.  I happen to know for a fact that, in spite of working for Exxon, my father is not a bad man.  He provides for his family and works tirelessly to sustain our quality of life.  Believe it or not, Exxon is not out to gouge people at the pumps, as my father's work helps prevent gas prices from soaring.

Secondly, the author is clearly strongly biased against war.  There's no getting around the fact that war is hell.  This does not, however, mean that war is necissarily amoral.  For example, Slater mentions that following this experiment one of the 65% became a consiensence objector to "the war," which I assume refers to Vietnam.  That would place this individual as a part of the group that won the public opinion in the US, leading to congressional refusal to support South Vietnam during the North's offensive following the Paris Peace Accords.  America pulled out of Vietnam and the South fell.  Then comes the part that nobody likes to talk about.  Nobody likes to talk about mass killings and ethnic cleansings by the Communist states that followed the fall of Saigon.  Nobody like to talk about the one and a half million people slain in Cambodia.  Nobody likes to talk about how this shouldn't have been a big surprise, because nobody likes to talk about about the fact that people had a habit of dying under Communist rule (10-20 million under Stalin and 40-70 million un Mao, just to name a couple).  So I ask, which is the lesser evil: fighting a war against an enemy that would cut down anyone in their path, or pulling out of a war with the same people.

Thirdly, when WWII vet Joshua talks about the "SOB Japs" that he captured during the way, the author is clearly at the least shocked, at the most appauled by Joshua's un-PC language.  I wouldn't condone that description at any other time, given the context and given what I know about Japan during WWII I don't have any big problem with it.  Several years ago I had the opportunity of reading the debriefing of a relative who served in the Pacific theater.  He was captured by the Japanese and ended up in a Philippine POW camp.  He then took part in a little something called the Bataan Death March.  I won't go into the details, but believe me when I say that debriefing was one of the hardest things I've ever read.  Let's just say that Joshua's description of the people he was fighting was one of the gentler descriptions he could have used.