Topic > Skinner's Box Opening Analysis - 1162

This is done well, but obviously also shows a rather biased view of the situation. In the only interview mentioned we find an unflattering portrait of a person who stopped the shocking experiments. Nothing in the descriptions presents him in a positive light, and we eventually find out that he stopped the experiment out of fear for his own heart. The reader is then left to draw his own conclusions. Reasonably, it can be assumed that the reader will come to the idea that most people do not help others out of altruism and that this experiment reveals a dark part of the human psyche and soul. However, the experiment is fundamentally flawed by both cultural and authoritative expectations. As the author continues in subsequent chapters, there is a high probability that if two people are alone in an environment devoid of expectations, one will help the other. Instead, in this experiment most people assume that the scientist, the only person with full knowledge of what is happening, knows best. And why shouldn't they? Most people trust doctors to give them injections, and if they hear someone having a seizure, they can be relatively certain that doctors will take care of them. They wouldn't push doctors aside and try to help themselves, because they would trust the person with the most knowledge of the situation to make a considered and informed opinion.