[5] After the birth of her daughter, Slater wrote her memoir Love Works Like This,[6] to chronicle the decisions she made related to her psychiatric illness and her pregnancy.
These include B.F. Skinner's work on behaviorism; Stanley Milgram's demonstration of how ordinary people can be influenced to obey authority; David Rosenhan's 1972 experiment in which eight people feigned mental illness then gained admittance to psychiatric hospitals; Harry Harlow's experiments with monkeys and motherhood; and Bruce K. Alexander's Rat Park, where laboratory rats addicted to morphine turned the drug down when given a better life.
[13] In response to Corfield's criticism, Slater showed the New York Times an e-mail she received from Kagan, who was responding to a pre-publication fact-checking list she had sent him.
[14] Slater repeated several variants of the urban legend that B.F. Skinner raised his daughter Deborah in an operant conditioning chamber and subjected her to psychological experiments, resulting in psychosis that led her to sue her father and ultimately commit suicide.
[12] Slater's 2018 book, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds, examines the history of psychopharmacology through the lens of her own experience as a patient.
Author Lidija Haas, in a review for Harper's Magazine, commented, "if Slater has any discernible bias, it's in favor of human connection".
[17] Opening Skinner's Box was named "Dynamite - the most explosive book" of 2005 by Bild Der Wissenschaft [de][18] and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for science and technology writing.