The drug passed through the tube and the needle into the rats’ bloodstreams almost instantaneously when they pushed the lever. This required tethering the rat to the ceiling of the box with tubing and surgically implanting a needle, or catheter, into their jugular veins.
They perfected techniques that allowed the rats to inject small doses of a drug into themselves by pressing the lever. In the 1960s, some experimental psychologists began to think that the Skinner Box was a good place to study drug addiction. The data looked like this.ĭo you see any sign of rat angst or depression in these data? If not, the rats must be ok, right? We usually did not even look at the rats, but only at the data they produced in the Skinner Boxes by pressing their little levers. But we young psychologists were trained not to think about what the rats might be experiencing.
The metal floor made it possible for the experiment to administer electric shocks when the experiment was about punishment rather than reward, which it often was.ĭo you think that this would qualify as psychological abuse of rats? Of course it would, if there were such a crime. Inside Skinner Boxes, the rats could get tiny pellets of food one at a time, provided they pushed a little lever on the side of the box over and over and over. In the worst of times they were starved for 24 hours or more and put into Skinner Boxes that looked like this… Unlike human prisoners, the rats did not even get an exercise period outside their cramped cages.Īnd that was in the best of times. The only visual stimulation they got was seeing the people who brought food and water and cleaned the metal pans under their cages every few days. When I was an experimental psychologist, between about 19, white laboratory rats had to live in solitary confinement cellblocks like this…Īlthough the rats lived in close proximity, they could neither see nor touch each other, because the sides of their cages were made of sheet metal.
…you certainly wouldn’t want to live in a psychology laboratory. Alexander,Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University