Reviewed by Tricia Brick

In 1961, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram asked his volunteers to give electric shocks to a fellow research subject as part of an experiment supposedly testing the role of punishment in learning. We’ve all heard the outlines of this story: the actor at the receiving end of the “punishment” screamed in pain, cried out that his heart was failing — still, urged on by a man in a white coat, 65 percent of the volunteers continued to give those shocks until there was only silence.

In Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, the psychologist and memoirist Lauren Slater delves deeply into ten such extraordinary experiments, taking them out of the technical literature and placing them into the character-driven, vibrantly detailed real life of nonfiction storytelling. Incorporating historical narratives, scientific exposition, biographical sketches, and provocative analysis, the book is a marvelous adventure, richly detailed, surprising, and often beautifully written. As our guide through these incredible experiments, Slater is perhaps a bit more visible than necessary; often, the narratives are built upon the skeleton of the writer’s research process rather than the experiments themselves. Nevertheless she proves to be a disarmingly likable traveling companion — curious, smart, irreverent, and lyrical— as she transforms scientists and research subjects into colorful, complex characters, their experiments into remarkable stories that also raise tough questions about how our minds work.

Unfortunately, readers of Opening Skinner’s Box have raised another kind of question, one that casts doubts on the accuracy of many of the portrayals here. For example, in the title chapter, Slater describes interviewing an eccentric pipe-smoking Harvard psychologist who “dives under his desk” to illustrate a point about free will — and who has since denied the incident happened. And this is not the only event she is accused of inventing. She speculates on the long-term psychological effects on B. F. Skinner’s daughter, Deborah, of her time spent in his controversial “baby box” — but fails to do the basic research necessary to find Deborah alive and well. Slater has rebutted many of the challenges, but the tarnish remains.

The author of such autobiographical works as Prozac Diary and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Slater made her name as an explorer of the darker corners of the human psyche, the situations that give the lie to our perceptions of our human selves — and of reality — as rational, knowable, and stable. A writer whose style veers toward the poetic and metaphorical, Slater has often reinvented the facts of her life to try to reach a greater truth. And in memoir, such literary license is often taken. But in a book like Opening Skinner’s Box, it’s not only the Big Truth that matters, it is also the smaller truths, the vivid and extraordinary (and factual) details that turn the stuff of scientific journals into human stories. So the allegations that she’s played loose with the facts are more troubling -- and, if true, most unfortunate.