The book has many interesting anecdotes about some of the most infamous psychological tests, but its tone, attempting an almost poetic one, was not to my liking.
[B. F. Skinner's] vision was to build a worldwide community where the government would consist of behavioral psychologists who could condition, or train, its citizens into phalanxes of benevolent robots. Of all the twentieth century's psychologists, his experiments and the conclusions he drew about the mechanistic nature of men and women may be the the most reviled, yet continuously relevant to our increasingly technological age.
Skinner found that irregularly rewarded behaviour was the hardest to eradicate. [...] Why your best friend hangs on the phone, waiting for that mean boyfriend with an occasional streak of kindness to call, just call. Oh please call! Why perfectly normal people empty their coffers in smoky casinos and wind up in terrible trouble. [...] It was all about this thing called intermittent reinforcement and he could show it, its mechanisms, the contingencies of compusion.
