The Odds Of Survival In Opening Skinner's Box

In the book Opening Skinner's Box, written by Slater, people tend to change their behavior based on hearing news about crimes being committed. For example, a person named David Phillips in the book adjusts his actions after noticed some recurring events that keep on happening. Because of this, Phillips is seen and observed as being cautious. David Phillips is surely right about being "prudent to play those odds" through the instances of him proving the odds of survival change, giving exact statistics, and coming up with a title for his observations. Phillips demonstrate himself functioning as prudent which he even confirms the odds of survival changing. According to Slater, "Dr. Phillips has done us a service by demonstrating the odds for survival when we travel change measurably for a time following the publication of certain kinds of front page stories. It seems only prudent to play those odds (Slater 108)." In other words, Slater believes that Phillips has helped others to be more aware of the changes in survival when traveling by pointing out actual events that prove it, however, this just shows how he is prudent. Phillips displays himself to be …show more content…
Slater herself writes, "Phillips has dubbed this phenomenon "the Werther effect," because after Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther, about an overwrought fictional character who killed himself for unrequited love, a rash of suicides rippled through eighteenth-century Germany (Slater 107)." Slater's point is that Phillips named his findings based on this book that affected those who read the novel. The fact Phillips decided to labeled a theory he has more so add that he is prudent. If not, he would not have used his time to find out why these suicide rates went up during the eighteenth-century. There would be no title for this occurrence, neither researching the cause of these suicides, which was the