Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century Highlight

These findings are compatible with the new “coping” interpretation of human opiate addiction if one keeps in mind that rats are by nature extremely gregarious, active, curious animals. Solitary confinement causes extraordinary psychic distress in human beings and is likely to be just as stressful to other sociable species, and therefore to elicit extreme forms of coping behavior such as the use of powerful analgesics and tranquilizers, in this case morphine.