In The One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it is made clear that the only way you are getting out alive is if you are an Acute and you conform to Big Nurse’s rules and standards. Once you become a Chronic, you’re there for life. Because of operant conditioning, Nurse Ratched was able to wrap the boys around her finger to make them conform. Operant conditioning is when behavior choices change in response to consequences. So the Acutes would conform to avoid lobotomies, shock therapy, and the high risk of becoming a Chronic and never escaping her grasp. One man who really fleshed out our definition of operant conditioning was B.F. Skinner. He did multiple experiments where he taught pigeons to read and rats to recognize different types of music just by classical conditioning. Nurse Ratched conditions the Acutes to behave by making an example of the Chronics, knowing none of them to want to end up like them, unable to ever escape. For this reason, they conform and act in line like Big Nurse wants them to. Similar to Skinner and his box, Nurse Ratched had her dayroom and the glass to watch the patients through, controlling and modifying their behavior.
Citations
McLeod, S. (2007). B.F. Skinner. Retrieved January 28, 2019, from https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/44186702/Skinner.pdf? AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1548739124&Signature=zQdJM7O2Nu2odAfTSvSDu0c9jRQ=&response-content-disposition=inline; filename=Skinner_-_Operant_Conditioning.pdf Source updated in 2015
Myers, D. G. (2001). Psychology: David G. Myers(10th ed.). New York: Worth.
Ratched Psychology 