Stormy Weather Forum

I just finished reading David McGowan's Understanding the F-Word and initially found it very interesting and enjoyable. I wanted to follow up on a few of his topics starting with Chapter 28 Lies my Psychology Professors Taught Me. After all of about 10 minutes online I found that McGowan's claim that B.F. Skinner's daughter committed suicide is an urban legend.

On page 205: "Like Watson, he used his own child as a human guinea pig, raising her in the thermostatically controlled, sound-proof isolation chamber for the first two years of her life, cut off from human contact. Skinner ultimately followed a bit too closely in the footsteps of his mentor; Debbie Skinner, like Albert Watson, committed suicide in her twenties."

This is B.F.'s daughter Deborah Skinner Buzan writing an angry letter in regards to the book Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/mar/12/highereducation.uk

So this destroyed in my mind any credibility McGowan may have as a researcher.

DM is suspect, I agree, even if his work is quite compelling. He was a technical adviser on National Treasure (the Nic Cage movie). And he never answered my emails!

In Programmed to Kill I found at least one major error: he claimed that the Boston Strangler movie came out before the De Salvo trial was finished, thereby cementing the suspect's guilt in the jury's mind. In fact, it came out the year after the trial ended. A small detail, but telling.

I emailed McG about it, but didn't get a response.