Brooks pg.

Sydney Brooks
3rd Hour
McCauley
December 19th, 2014
Skinners Box
The human mind is a vast expanse of unknown formulas and information that scientists
have tried to understand since the beginning of time. We are continuously faced with the
misunderstandings and ambiguity that surround the mind, and the psychological effects of love,
addiction, fear, insanity, and rationalization. The book Opening Skinners Box by Lauren Slater
discusses the above effects, along with multiple others. The experiments in Slaters book are all
connected by our human curiosity and need to rationalize and understand why we act and react
the way that we do.
At the base of the field of Psychology, are the concepts of operant and classical
conditioning. Operant conditioning is done using reinforcement or punishment to condition a
person or animal to do something that they would not otherwise do. B.F. Skinner was the
founding father of operant conditioning experiments. Skinner conditioned pigeons and rats to do
what he wanted them to either rewarding them with food or punishing them when they did not do
the right thing. For his experiments, he invented the Skinner box, one of his most famous
inventions that had many different functions. An example of operant conditioning is positively
rewarding a child with candy for doing his homework.
Classical conditioning is conditioning a beings autonomic nervous system to respond to
a certain stimulus. Ivan Pavlov did many studies with classical conditioning. In his studies,
Pavlov used dogs to show the effects of classical conditioning. One experiment that he conducted

Brooks pg. 2

involved lab workers ringing a bell every time before they fed the dogs. After a while, the lab
workers would ring the bell and the dogs would start to salivate even when no food was
presented to them, their autonomic nervous systems anticipating the food.
The first effect that Lauren Slater discusses in her book is love. The section of the book
titled Monkey Love discusses what effects love has on primates and leads us to ask what love
really is and what it causes humans to do. Until this time, many people thought that human and
animal babies love their mothers only because they feed them. Harry Harlow conducted
experiments on Rhesus monkeys to try to find out what love really is. He chose to study Rhesus
monkeys because they have about ninety four percent of the same DNA as humans. Harlow
started by separating the newborn monkeys from their mothers at birth. He designed two
surrogate mothers for the baby monkeys, one was a wire mother who had a bottle of milk
implanted in its chest and the other was a cloth mother who had no food. Harlow did alternate
experiments with the surrogate mothers, but the main experiment consisted of the soft cloth
mother who had no food and the wire mother with food. When doing the experiment, the baby
monkeys spent much more time with the cloth mothers, only going to the wire mothers to feed
and running back to their soft mothers for comfort. Harlow discovered that the emotion of love is
not generated only because of the giving of food; love is generated much more by touch. Touch
is indeed a primary need and is critical for sanity. Harlow later learned that motion and play were
also necessary factors to produce productive monkeys, and possibly humans.
The monkeys that grew up without live mothers were different in adulthood than normal
monkeys. Harlow found out that the motherless monkeys did not know how to or did not want to
interact and mate with other monkeys. When Harlow forced the monkeys to reproduce and give
birth, the motherless monkeys, who were now mothers themselves, did not know how to parent

Brooks pg. 3

their young. Some of the mothers killed their offspring and others ignored them and did not
attempt to feed or teach them. A small portion of the motherless mothers were able to adequately
raise their babies (Slater, pg 147).
Harlow also conducted experiments with the monkeys and Iron Maidens. These
creations were mothers that abused their baby monkeys. Some of the Iron Maidens stabbed the
babies, while others shot out freezing water. In all of these experiments, Harlow discovered that
the baby monkeys held onto their Iron Maiden mothers no matter what they did to them. In her
book, Slater writes, My god, love is strong. You are mauled and you come crawling back. You
are frozen, and yet you still seek heat from the same wrong source. There is no partial
reinforcement to explain this behavior; there is only the dark side of touch, the reality in primate
relationships, which is that they can kill us while they hold us- thats sad. (Slater, pg. 141).
Harlow also experimented on the effects of aloneness. Some monkeys were taken into
isolation chambers where they could not move or interact and hear other monkeys or humans.
They were left in the chambers for up to six weeks. After the monkeys were released from the
chambers, many suffered from mental illness. Some showed signs of severe psychosis and some
showed extreme depression. The lab workers speculated that the monkeys would recover in a
matter of weeks, months, or years, but in reality they never were able to. This experiment says
much about mental illness and depression in humans.
Before reading the chapter in Slaters book called Monkey Love, I did not have full
respect for primates. I thought they were like most other animals and did not have much
reasoning ability or relevance to humans. I knew that they were closely related to humans by
DNA, but not that their situational behavior would so closely reflect the behavior of humans. The

Brooks pg. 4

chapter on Monkey Love made me realize how important the nurturing of an infant and child
really is. I also realized how amazingly important touch is for our sanity.
Our society is greatly affected by how parents raise and love their children. If parents do
not give children the love, touch, motion, and play that they need, then the children will not be
able to develop to their full potential. When the undeveloped child grows up and has their own
child, they may not be able to adequately care for it. This causes their child to grow up without
knowing how to be a good parent because their parent was not effective at teaching them because
their parent did into care for them. The cycle goes on and on because of one parent who decided
not to take the time to properly parent their child. This cycle could be what is affecting our
generation today.
Another societal finding that Harlows experiments show is ones willingness to return to
their abuser. In the Iron Maiden example, the baby monkeys always returned to their Iron
Maiden mothers after they had hurt them. This example proves to be true with humans also.
Children who are abused still love and stay with parents who have abused them. Women who are
abused by their lovers come running back, time after time. For some odd reason, love makes us
do crazy things. Humans go to amazing extremes just to feel affection, even for a short amount
of time. We need to feel loved. Love allows us an excuse to rationalize and justify our behaviors
that may be impulsive, risky, and even life threatening.
A different section of the book Opening Skinners Box is about the effect of addiction.
This chapter of questioning whether or not addiction actually exists is called Rat Park. Rat
Park is a series of experiments performed by Dr. Bruce Alexander where he used rats to find out
how drugs and addiction affect humans. Alexander had seen experiments of rats locked cages,
given regular water and morphine water, and forced to choose which water to drink. Of course

Brooks pg. 5

they picked the morphine water, they had been locked in small cages their whole lives. Even if
the rats had reasoning abilities, it would make sense that they would drink the morphine.
Sometimes the rats had to do risk their lives for their precious drug. Some were electrified, some
were burnt, some ran across an electric field so many times that they killed themselves. But the
rats had nothing else to do, nothing else to enjoy but the high of the drug.
Dr. Alexander did surveys and found that, ninety-five percent of Ontarians who used
cocaine do so less than once a month(Slater pg. 159). Another experiment consisting of twentyseven cocaine users concluded with only one of those twenty-seven becoming a compulsive user.
In an survey of veterans of the Vietnam war he found that, Ninety percent of the men who
became addicted to heroin on the war fields stopped using once they hit home turf. (Slater pg.
159). These experiments suggest that psychological addiction may not be a common occurrence.
Physical addiction though, is a different story. Physical addiction occurs when ones body
becomes dependent on a drug. Over a period of time, when one has used a drug, and overflowed
their neurons with stimulus, the brain stops producing its natural pleasure hormone, dopamine.
Therefore when one stops using a drug, they feel no pleasure, their physical pain cannot be
soothed naturally because their bodies have stopped producing the pleasure hormones. This is
what causes such strong withdrawal symptoms when drug users try to stop using.
Alexander decided to build a Rat Park to test his theory. In the park, rats would have
plenty of space to run around, a perfectly controlled temperature, toys to play with, other rats to
bond and mate with, and an all around comfortable living space. The park was painted with
beautiful scenery from all over the world. The rats in the rat park, along with a control group of
rats which were kept in cages, were given a choice of regular water or morphine laced water to
drink. Some of the rats in the cages, and none of the rats in the rat park drank the bitter morphine

Brooks pg. 6

water. Since rats are more attracted to sweet tasting things, Alexander created another
experiment.
In this experiment, the Seduction experiment, the morphine water contained sugar. Each
day, more and more sugar sugar was added to the water. The isolated rats in cages drank sixteen
times more of the morphine water than the rats in the park did. Surprisingly, the rats in the rat
park avoided drinking the morphine water at all costs. In the rats minds, being stoned interrupts
their normal social behaviors (Slater pg. 166). The rats in the park that did drink the morphine
water did not show a preference for it at a later time, therefore they were not addicted. This is
evidence that rats, and possibly humans, do not inherently like the high that they get from drugs
because it impairs their ability to function.
After much research and numerous experiments and studies, Alexander tried to publish
his findings in Science and Nature. The first time he submitted his findings, they were turned
down. He tried again and again, but they would not take his work. He eventually got published in
a much smaller journal. Many people ask why Alexanders work, although revolutionary, was
rejected. I believe Science and Nature could not publish his findings because they were afraid of
the kind of publicity that might have come from his work. In a round about way, Alexander was
saying that addiction was not real, being addicted was a decision, and that drugs were not to
blame for the bad things that come from their use. Many people still argue about addiction today.
Some say that addiction is not real and can be overcome. Others believe that if one does drugs,
they will become addicted and will turn into a junkie. They do not believe that it is persons fault
at all, because they are addicted. These people do not think that an addict can free themselves
from their addiction. I believe that the board members were scared to bring that controversy into
their journal.

Brooks pg. 7

Kleber, one of Alexanders opponents, preaches that addiction comes from exposure to
drugs. I agree with Alexander in that drug use and addiction come from the circumstances that
one is placed in, the weight on ones shoulders, the poverty, and the extreme stress. When one is
placed in a situation where they are in poverty, do not have a job, do not have a strong family or
social life, they may feel the need to use drugs. It works the same with wealthy people who
become addicted to drugs. When they are not confident, do not have a balanced family structure,
and have many obligations, they may feel like a caged rat that has no where else to turn. In
Opening Skinners Box, Slater discusses a woman who is an addict. The womans husband tells
Lauren that he has never met someone who had adequate internal and external resources and
who was an addict (Slater pg. 179). In my mind, that man was right. To protect ourselves from
addiction, we should try our best to maintain that internal and external balance and sense of
wholeness. We should make friends that will protect us from loneliness and depression and
would help if we needed it. I know that I am going to take that advice. I have recently learned
that isolation is not the way to go. To be successful, we need friends and family to bond with. As
an extrovert at heart, I know that I do.
Alexander theorized that the biomedical establishments suppress information and studies
like his because if they admitted the validity of his research, we would have to clean up our
inner-city projects and change our policies, funding education over medicalization (Slater pg.
170). As a society, we let drug abuse happen. We do this so we can say that the people that are in
poverty in our country are struggling because of drug abuse and addiction. The medical field and
rehabilitation clinics also make enormous amounts of money every year using the concept of
addiction. Our society cannot get rid of drugs because in trying to do so, they have made the
industry much more secretive and profitable for those manufacturing and dealing drugs. Their

Brooks pg. 8

effort makes the manufacturers and dealers that much harder to eradicate. Also, the
pharmaceutical companies profit greatly from the huge amount of drug abusers in the United
States. The abuse of drugs is not going to be thwarted any time soon.
The next section of Slaters book is called In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing.
This section discusses the effect of fear on the human being. The chapter starts with the case of a
woman who was publicly raped and murdered over a period of thirty-five minutes in the parking
lot of her apartment complex. There were thirty-eight witnesses saw the scene and could have
saved her life. They did nothing. Many people were shocked to hear about the situation, but no
one could explain why they did not help the woman. Researchers, Darley and Latane decided to
find out. They designed an experiment where an actor first talked over a microphone about being
prone to seizures and then faked an attack. The test subject, thinking that the actor was really
having a seizure, and that there were other people being interviewed the same way as them,
either went to get help for the person having a seizure or they did not. They set the experiment up
so it was similar to the murder of the woman, in that the test subjects thought that there were
other people hearing the same thing and that they could also do something about it. Only thirtyone percent of the test subjects left their solitary room to go get help for the man having a
seizure. Thirty-one percent. When the same test was given, but the person thought that they
were alone with the actor, eighty-five percent of the subjects reacted. These stunning results are
due to diffusion of responsibility. The more people present, the less obligated a person will feel
to act. When someone knows that there is no one else to help, they are much more likely to act.
For example, when a group of people of two hundred is asked to produce ten volunteers, the
people in the crowd are less likely to volunteer than if a group of twelve was asked to produce

Brooks pg. 9

ten volunteers. There are less people present, so everyone knows that they will need to take
responsibility.
There was another experiment where subjects were put into rooms. Some subjects had
other actors in the room and some were alone in the room. Experimenters pumped a powdered
smoke in through the vents so it looked like smoke from a fire. The test subjects that were in a
group where no one else reacted to the smoke, did not react either. Most of the subjects that were
alone in the room immediately reported the smoke. These results are partially affected by
diffusion of responsibility, but also the drive that humans have to be similar to the people around
them. If the other people in the room were not worried about the smoke, the subjects thought that
they should not be worried either.
The Werther Effect is a theory explains the increase in suicides after publicized suicide.
This effect was named for a fictional character who killed himself for unrequited love. In the
story, many people committed suicide after he did. In a study by David Phillips, it was found that
within two months after every front-page suicide story, an average of fifty-eight more people
that usual killed themselves (Slater pg. 106). The Werther effect, initially explaining imitative
suicide, might also explain the rise in car and plane wrecks after a well known person commits
suicide. People who read about or hear about others committing suicide may feel compelled to
do it themselves. Maybe this theory is valid, but it could also be that we dont usually pay
attention to the amounts of car and plane wrecks unless we are looking for a certain factor. It
may be that the amounts of wrecks and suicides remain about the same all of the time, but we are
not normally paying attention.
Once I was with my brother, my boyfriend, and my brothers girlfriend at a gas station in
Niles. I was in the back of my brothers truck when he got out of the truck, went inside to pay,

Brooks pg. 10

and pumped his gas. When my brother was inside, I saw an elderly woman at the gas pump in
front of us that seemed to be having a really hard time putting the fuel in her gas tank. At that
moment, I knew that someone should help her. There were other people outside pumping their
gas, my brother was coming out of the gas station, and my brothers girlfriend was sitting in the
front seat where she could have easily gotten out of the truck. No one helped her. I should have
got out of my brothers car and helped the lady, but I didnt. This situation relates to the time that
the woman was killed in her apartment parking lot. I thought that maybe since there were so
many other people at the gas station, someone else would help her. It was my mistake to let the
responsibility diffuse. I was also worried that if I got out to help her and she did not want or need
help, that I would feel bad. In the end, I felt bad because I did not help her. I knew I should have
and I didnt.
Many people say that they have fixed ethics. They claim that under any circumstance,
they would always make the same ethical decisions. Personally, I know that my ethics are
situational. What I think is the right thing to do depends on the situation. Obviously, I know that
certain things should always be wrong such as killing or stealing. I will not say though, that I
would never, under any circumstance kill, because I probably would if I had to. I will not say that
I would never steal, because under certain circumstances, I most likely would. One cannot truly
know and understand their ethical boundaries until that situation is presented. We can talk all we
want about what we would do in certain situations, but what we say we will do and what we end
up doing are usually two totally different things.
Five stages of helping behavior have been identified. They are that the helper must notice
that the event is occurring, the helper must believe that help is needed in that event, they must
assume personal responsibility, they must decide an action to take, and they must take action.

Brooks pg. 11

These five steps of helping have been taught to groups of students. The students who were
educated about the process were found to be more helpful and action taking in situations where
help was needed. Many people believe that these criteria should be taught in all schools, while
others believe that it should not be taught in schools. In reality, there is no reason why we
shouldnt teach the stages of helping behavior in schools. It will not do any harm to teach
children information that they could use to their advantage for the rest of their lives. There are
only good things that come from being educated about good helping behavior.
Another section of the book Opening Skinners Box is called On Being Sane In Insane
Places. Sanity is a topic that is discussed by many. The insane go to mental hospitals after being
diagnosed with an extreme disorder by a psychiatrist. David Rosenhan decided to test the field of
Psychiatry. He made up an experiment where he and eight other people pretended to be insane
and got admitted into different mental institutions. The experiment was to find out if the
psychiatrists in the institutions would recognize the sane people as sane. Upon the
experimenters arrivals at the institutions, the psychiatrists asked what was wrong with them.
They were all to reply that they were hearing a voice and the voice said thud. They were to
answer honestly to the rest of the psychiatrist's questions. All nine of the experimenters, or
pseudopatients were admitted into the mental institutions and diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Once inside, the people were to act totally normal. They were to tell the psychiatrists that the
voice was gone and that they were better. They did so, but they were not released. The
experimenters were kept at the hospitals for seven to fifty-two days before they were released
with the diagnoses of remission. Remission meaning that their disorder was temporarily better
and that they would be readmitted later when it came back. Another factor that plays into this
experiment is that people see what they expect or want to see. The nurses and psychiatrists in an

Brooks pg. 12

insane asylum assume that every patient there is insane. When someone goes into the doctors
office and says that they have Ebola, they will be treated as if they have Ebola whether they do
or not. If a normal student is told that they are smarter than the rest of the students, they will
develop into a better student than the rest, just because of what they were told.
Many years later, Lauren Slater decided to recreate Rosenhans experiment. She
attempted to get into a mental institution the same way that Rosenhan and his colleagues did. She
went to a institution, said that she heard a voice that said thud, and answered the rest of the
questions honestly. She was not admitted, not deferred, but given antipsychotic and
antidepressant drugs. She repeated her experiment eight more times and every time she was
diagnosed with psychotic depression and given medications. In the end, different doctors had
prescribed her twenty-five antipsychotics and sixty antidepressants.
In todays society, doctors and psychiatrists have so many patients that they cannot pay
full attention to each and every one of them. This is why when someone goes to the doctor or to a
psychiatrist they are just given medications. Prescribing a patient medication makes the
professional feel like they have done something to help their patient, when in reality the patient
may not need to be medicated. Today, we rely very much on drugs to calm us down, make the
pain go away, and to escape. I feel that we should change how we help patients with mental
illness. Many people who are suffering from depression, psychotic disorder, and many more
disorders do not need to be heavily medicated. They need help from other people to come back
to reality. They do not need to be tranquilized into nothingness.
In the original Rosenhan experiment, the institutions never detected the experimenter's
sanity. While the doctors and psychiatrists did not believe that the experimenters were sane, the
insane people in the institution knew that they were. They could see it. The workers and

Brooks pg. 13

psychiatrists of the institutions may have noticed too if they had paid more attention. This being
true, some people question the validity of our court system. Many people each year plead
insanity to get out of crimes that they have committed. Those people are reviewed by
psychiatrists before the case goes on. If the person is diagnosed as psychotic or insane the case
could be thrown out or the person may receive a lesser punishment. People are wrongly
diagnosed all of the time, but this situation is serious. When one or more psychiatrists say that a
person is insane when they are really sane, justice has not been served. Some people suggest that
insane people should help in determining the saneness or insaneness of a defendant. I think that
insane people could be incorporated into the process of separating the sane and insane, but it
would be impractical to simply let insane people determine the fate of the defendant.
Roshenhans final experiment happened when he published the findings of his thud
experiment. The mental institutions must have been very embarrassed and must have felt
exposed by Rosenhan. They tried to fight back. They contacted him with a challenge, You think
we dont know what we are doing? Heres a dare. In the next three months send as many
pseudopatients as you like to our emergency room, and well detect them. Go ahead. (Slater pg.
76). Rosenhan accepted. Three months later, the institutions were proud. They presented fortyone pseudopatients. In reality, Rosenhan had not sent any pseudopatients. The field of Psychiatry
was severely put down by this experiment. The results of this experiment make me sad for the
psychiatrists because it was pathetic that they found forty-one sane people in an insane asylum.
It makes me wonder if those people were never insane to begin with and were stuck in the
asylum or if the psychiatrists were expecting that sane people were going to be checking in and
made insane people seem sane. It would be a hard thing to do, to distinguish a sane person from
an insane person. I can empathize with the psychiatrists because normal, sane people can do

Brooks pg. 14

things that are insane and no one looks down upon them because humanity is imperfect. Insane
people can do sane or insane things and since they were once labeled insane, they are insane
no matter what they do. Even if they were never insane to begin with, people do not notice when
supposedly insane people do normal, sane things.
In Slaters book, Quieting the Mind is a chapter about rationalization. Leon Festinger
was the psychologist who made up cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort
that happens when someone has a mental conflict and cannot explain something that happens, so
their minds make up a story that makes sense. Festinger refers to cognitive dissonance as, the
adjustment of ones belief to fit ones behavior- instead of changing ones behavior to fit ones
belief (Slater pg. 112). One day, someone set up an experiment. Maybe it was supposed to be
some kind of joke. The person sent a letter to a woman that was supposedly from a God. The
God warned her that on a certain date, there would be a massive flood that would take out most
of the world. The God said that anyone would believed in him would be saved. At first she did
not think much of the letter, but the woman continued to get letters of warning. She began to
worry and prepare for the flood. She told others about the oncoming doom. Soon, a cult of
believers was started. Leon Festinger decided to send people to act like they believed and join
the cult to study them. By this time, many people had joined the group of believers. Many quit
jobs and left their homes to prepare for the night that they would be taken to a new planet, at
least that is what their God told them. The panicked group of people found messages in the
days before the supposed end of the world. They got phone calls from practical jokers and
believed that they were secret ways of their God telling them what was going to happen. They
made signs out of things that really were not signs at all, such as tin foil on the carpet meaning
that everyone that would board the ship had to remove any metal from their clothing. The time

Brooks pg. 15

came and went, and nothing happened. After that, the cult believed that God saved the world
because the cult had told so many people about it. Those people made rationalizations according
to the things that they believed, instead of changing their beliefs. Rationalizing is a necessary
part of human life. We need it to remain sane.
Festinger had a class full of his college students run an experiment. They paid some
people twenty dollars to lie. These people, when confronted about their lie, admitted that they
lied because they were paid twenty dollars. Other people in the experiment were paid only one
dollar to lie. When those people were confronted about their lies, they were most likely to lie
again and say that they thought they were telling the truth. They might even convince themselves
that they believed what they said was true. Those people that lied for a dollar had a much harder
time justifying their actions because a dollar does not even matter. It is such a small amount of
money that when they thought about it, the dollar was not worth lying for. They were
embarrassed for others to know what they did, and they experienced cognitive dissonance.
V. S. Ramachandran studied how the human brain deals with denial. He discovered that a
part of our brain senses when our beliefs are being challenged. That part of the brain is
responsible for the dissonance. Another part of the human brain then overcomes the first part of
the brain. He discovered that people from Asian backgrounds seemed to experience much less
dissonance than we, as Americans do. He theorized that they have this ability because of their
spiritual exercise. Maybe their brains are wired a little bit different because of their Zen practice.
Maybe they have the same amount of dissonance as we do, but their experiences have let them
control or not feel the need to act on their dissonance.
I believe that love is one of many rationalizations that humans make to avoid dissonance.
Maybe we just made up the idea of love because there was no other way that we could describe

Brooks pg. 16

our actions and feelings. There is no other way to explain why we stay with abusive parents or
lovers. No other word to describe all of the emotions that you feel simultaneously for that one
person. Humans invented a powerful force called love that could be used as an explanation for
mostly anything. We needed the security that our rationalizations causes. Without love, the world
would not be functional. For our peace of mind, we made up an idea called love, a force that
makes people do crazy and beautiful things.
Festinger stated that, we spend our lives paying attention only to information that is
constant with our beliefs, we surround ourselves with people who will support our beliefs, and
we ignore contradictory information that might cause us to question what we have built (Slater
pg. 121). This statement proves true for most of the people in the world. In my life, I try very
hard to step outside of my comfort zone. I enjoy when others challenge my ideas and beliefs.
Their disagreement causes me to think about my reasoning. I like hearing other peoples opinions
and putting myself in their shoes. It does not scare me when people to tell me that I am wrong, I
just appreciate if after they tell me that I am wrong, they explain why I am wrong. Even though it
is nearly impossible to do, I constantly try to pay attention to all information, not just the
information that pertains to me and my beliefs.
Festinger also believed that Christianity came about as a result of cognitive dissonance.
He believed that when people saw Christ on the cross, their minds had to rationalize what they
saw, because Christ was never supposed to be in pain. When that part of their beliefs was
disrupted, the people started rationalizing and making up their own stories of what happened to
him. The people needed comfort, so the cognitive dissonance set in. In reality, if Christianity is a
result of rationalizations caused by cognitive dissonance, then all religion may be a
rationalization. Maybe we made up religion because we are afraid of what happens when we die,

Brooks pg. 17

maybe we need someone, a God to follow. Maybe we were lost and needed direction. Maybe we
had no other way to explain how life on earth was formed. For whatever reason, I believe that
Christianity and all religion may have come about as a result of humans need for rationalization.
Going back to Festingers experiment of lying for one dollar versus lying for twenty
dollars, people in todays society act much like the people in the experiment did. More money, or
motivation, justifies wrong doing. This being said, it is frightening to think about the ethics of
people with high paying jobs. They may be able to justify their wrong moral decisions involving
work because of all of the money that they make. For example, a drug dealer makes a lot of
money. Though, he does not feel bad about what he is doing or the people that he hurts because
he is making an insane amount of money. This is both sad and very unsettling.
Leon Festinger claims that man is not a rational being, but a rationalizing being (Slater
pg. 118). Inherently, we are not rational. We are not born that way, we cannot act perfectly
rational, but we can try our best to rationalize and make things make sense to us. We rationalize
and justify our actions by surrounding ourselves with other people that affirm our beliefs. This
goes for people that do good things and like to be around other people that do good things. It also
explains why people that do bad things surround themselves with other people who do bad
things. Being around people that do the same thing and have the same beliefs makes a person
feel like what they are thinking or doing the right thing. It is a comfortable way of life.
All of the above effects are tied together by our need for rationalization. We love because
we need the rationalization and comfort of the concept. We believe so much in addiction because
we cannot rationalize the reality of it, that addiction does not truly exist. We fear things that do
not make sense to us. When we respond out of fear, we make up rationalizations to explain why
we did what we did. The sane are so afraid of insanity that many people will not even talk about

Brooks pg. 18

it. The doctors and therapists that take care of the insane by drugging them, rationalize their
behavior to make themselves feel better about themselves. Our lives revolve around our ability to
rationalize and adapt to our environments. That is why living creatures are so incredibly
interesting. None of us are the same, yet we are all the same in the eyes of psychology.
Works Cited
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print.