Reading: Skinner 3 & 4

Chapter 3 focused on Rosenhan's experiment involving psychiatric diagnoses. Rosenhan felt that people were often institutionalized for much longer periods of time than appropriate based on his theory that once you attach a diagnosis to a patient, all that patient's actions are then interpreted with a bias. He conducted an experiment in which he and 8 confederates went to separate psychiatric institutions claiming to hear a "thud" and see how the institutions responded. They were instructed to behave normally, other than the "thud", and to claim to be cured once institutionalized. The results were disappointing and revealed several flaws in the methods of psychiatric care. Even today, psychiatry is considered a "soft-science" and riddled with pop-psychiatrists.

Chapter 4's topic was the infamous Genovese case. This case is discussed in many books due to the uncomfortable reality that it shed's light on. Genovese was murdered, slowly over the course of 35 minutes, screaming for help and drawing the attention of 38 witnesses. Despite all of this, nobody called the police until long after Genovese was dead. This drew a torrent of media attention and prompted Darley and Latane to conduct a series of experiments that revealed several interesting facts. Most notable was the phenomenon of responsibility diffusion, whereby the number of people witnessing an event drastically decreases the likelihood that someone will intervene, because nobody feels directly responsible enough to act.