Experiments of the Mind

From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter

Emily Martin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691232072
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An inside view of the experimental practices of cognitive psychology—and their influence on the addictive nature of social media Experimental cognitive psychology research is a hidden force in our online lives. We engage with it, often unknowingly, whenever we download a health app, complete a Facebook quiz, or rate our latest purchase. How did experimental psychology come to play an outsized role in these developments? Experiments of the Mind considers this question through a look at cognitive psychology laboratories. Emily Martin traces how psychological research methods evolved, escaped the boundaries of the discipline, and infiltrated social media and our digital universe.Martin recounts her participation in psychology labs, and she conveys their activities through the voices of principal investigators, graduate students, and subjects. Despite claims of experimental psychology's focus on isolated individuals, Martin finds that the history of the field—from early German labs to Gestalt psychology—has led to research methods that are, in fact, highly social. She shows how these methods are deployed online: amplified by troves of data and powerful machine learning, an unprecedented model of human psychology is now widespread—one in which statistical measures are paired with algorithms to predict and influence users' behavior. Experiments of the Mind examines how psychology research has shaped us to be perfectly suited for our networked age.

1

Doing This Ethnography

Throughout history, the red thread [Ariadne’s Thread, which she gave to Theseus to help him escape the labyrinth after he killed the Minotaur] has come to represent a pattern, or underlying current, that connects seemingly disparate thoughts to reveal a larger narrative woven just beneath the surface.

—STEPHANIE CRISTELLO, THE SEEN, 2018

MY FIRST attempts at observing experimental psychologists as an ethnographer met with failure. I emailed numerous colleagues in psychology at New York University, where I was a professor in the anthropology department, in which I explained what an ethnographic study of a science lab was like. I stressed that as an ethnographer I would be unobtrusive in the process of trying to understand what their work was about and what it meant to them. I would want to hang out at lab meetings and conferences, as well as interview faculty and students in the lab. I would be seeking to grasp ordinary, normal practices and conceptions in their work: what anthropologist Tim Ingold called “a way of knowing from the inside.”¹ I would ask to “learn to learn” as Gregory Bateson put it, to be taught how to look at the psychology of human cognition through their eyes and how to do the technical experiments that would reveal new aspects of human cognition. The email I sent read:

Would you be willing to allow me to look in on or follow any studies you might be doing in the lab during the next couple of summers? Anything you might be working on would be of great interest to me. Alternatively, or in addition, do you think there is anyone else in the psychology department who would be amenable to my following any ongoing experimental work? Perhaps a student’s project in a lab? Of course, I would strictly follow confidentiality guidelines and try to be unobtrusive. I would greatly appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Although I knew most of these colleagues from academic committees and meetings, I never got a reply from any of them.

This aroused my interest, especially since not long before, I had rather easily gotten permission to talk with people who had medical—even psychiatric—diagnoses and the clinicians or research scientists interacting with them. As I have mentioned, initially I wanted to do this new ethnography to understand whether it matters that reports based on experimental psychology are broadcast loudly in the news, whereas reports based on anthropological research barely make a sound. The same could be said for research funding. Why was a field that sought to understand the human mind through experiments so able to benefit from major sources of funding? Was a part of this field’s appeal that it sought to describe universal aspects of the human mind in objective, scientific ways? This central assumption was certainly part of my fascination with the field and the source of my uneasy feeling about it. Trained in cultural anthropology, I was dubious about any purported human universals. I had been taught to assume that cultural ideas and practices vary tremendously and play a part in any supposedly universal human characteristic, even physical traits like height, weight, vision, or hearing. Eventually, over the course of this research, I came to appreciate that my understanding of what psychologists mean by universal traits of the human mind was far too simple. I also came to appreciate that my interlocutors in psychology were well aware of the problems with the universal claims that made me uneasy. They had long been aware of them, in fact, and they had already come to sophisticated ways of contending with them. Occasionally they expressed concerns about the ways their research was being used by internet companies to manipulate human behavior. But getting to these insights first required access to the daily life of their labs.

Stymied

I felt stymied but also intrigued after my initial futile efforts. So, I burrowed down in several oblique directions. I began to look into the history of anthropology and experimental psychology in relation to each other, I sought out general conversations with psychologists without bringing up any request for fieldwork, and I began to volunteer as a subject (a participant) in psychology experiments. Early on, a casual conversation with Dr. N, a neuroscientist from another country, shed light on my difficulty. She was proud of her country’s ethos of openness and democracy. She had no trouble explaining why I was being given the cold shoulder.

When I was a postdoc at Harvard, the psychology undergraduates protested the requirement to participate in psych experiments. And so, facing the difficulties of getting subjects from the general public, psychologists just started using each other—in other words, they became their own subjects. You can only tell this from the published papers because the subjects’ responses have the initials of lab members next to them.

Having dipped my toe into the history of experiments in psychology, I exclaimed that this was just like the earliest days of experimental psychology, when students alternated between the roles of experimenter and subject.

Dr. N continued,

That’s so. Subjects from the general population can be terrible. They might be a secretary from an academic department, for example. The ideal subject is an undergraduate student who’s taking classes and used to tests, who is basically willing to be disciplined, to sit still for a certain time and place and do a designated task, who understands the importance of clarity and consistency. And the general population may not. It is very frustrating to begin a series of tests with such a subject who is going to be a dud. Useless. They’re inconsistent, contradict themselves, and you end up wasting a whole series of experiments to get data which you can’t use. This is basically why people prefer to use each other for subjects in their own lab. And this is psychology’s dirty little secret.

She called the secret “dirty” because if known, it could undercut public confidence: the public might wonder whether subjects who knew a lot about the purpose and design of the experiment might unwittingly bias the results. Was it possible that because of protests from students and general concerns about the ethics of using human subjects, the field was undergoing a seismic shift in the nature of the human subjects it employed just at the moment of my field project? Could it be that being observed during such a time would be so uncomfortable that my proposed research would be anathema? This turned out not to be true. One subfield within experimental psychology, psychophysics, has long used lab members as subjects. Their experiments, aimed at understanding the relationships between sensations and the physical stimuli that produce them, are so lengthy and tedious that they require more discipline and motivation than an ordinary volunteer would have. This accommodation to the nature of their experimental tasks is not regarded as controversial. Other psychologists told me informally that they simply pay subjects, whether they are students or otherwise. Students who are required to participate for course credit tend to be less motivated and attentive than paid participants, so token payments ensure that all subjects behave appropriately. So much for Dr. N’s idea that a “dirty little secret” was the cause of my troubles.

Shortly after my talk with Dr. N, I was waiting to volunteer for an experiment in a psychology department on the West Coast. Dr. B popped out of his office a few doors down and struck up a conversation with me about the history of our respective fields. He was interested in the archival research I was doing about the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, a scientific endeavor that combined both early ethnography and experimental psychology. In the lab of Wilhelm Wundt, in Leipzig, Germany, some of the most enduring concepts in contemporary psychology had been born, and the Cambridge anthropologists took Wundt’s psychological instruments with them on the expedition. Over the next weeks, Dr. B and I traded early-twentieth-century books and articles about our fields, and in time he helped me find possible sites for my ethnographic research. He sent helpful emails to his colleagues (including the hyperbole typical of letters of reference):

A very nice and smart woman, Emily Martin is an anthropologist who is interested in the history of psychology in the 19–20th century. Her faculty position is at NYU. She is also interested in the development of psychological ideas. She hopes to follow two labs at another university but wants to follow a lab here. She would just show up at a few lab meetings, and not say anything. She has come to two cognitive psych conferences. She will not write anything that would embarrass us. I think your lab would be perfect. If you think this is OK, I will have her email you. You might want to have coffee with her first or something, but she is charming and smart. (About my age.)

His generosity and forthright recommendation opened a door into one lab on the West Coast. Such are the accidental lucky contacts that ethnographers depend upon!

In the meantime, an anthropologist with a joint appointment in psychology, Setha Low, offered to send a plea to her large network in New York City. I got only one reply. This psychologist interviewed me and, after expressing a lot of doubt (“Will there be a contract?”) and hesitation (“What exactly will you do?”), allowed me to begin attending lab meetings on a trial basis. Finally, I approached a former neighbor in another East Coast city who ran a psychology lab at a university where I had taught for almost twenty years. She was worried (“What if lab members don’t want to talk in front of you about things they could be criticized for?”) and apprehensive (“How will you keep our identity confidential given that our research is highly specific?”), but she too agreed to let me begin on a trial basis.

As I mentioned, the condition set on my research was that I would not “make them look bad.” I think they were legitimately worried about whether I would be looking for misconduct of some kind. Was I on the track of faked data or sloppy methodology that I could publicize and use to create yet another scandal for the field, one that could threaten their ability to continue getting grants and publications? This was never my goal at all, and I suspect that soon enough they realized that I did not know enough to be able to identify any such misconduct, even if I had wanted to. I realized that I would have to moderate my own initial critical take on the field. However, what was muted instead was my rather knee-jerk reaction to the idea of treating human beings as if their cognitive experiences could be studied by means of the experimental method. To my surprise, through long exposure and detailed observation, I did become convinced that important things could be learned with this method. And, also to my surprise, I found that my interlocutors actually shared many of my doubts and hesitations.

What began as a hard-won trial stretched into years. Between 2011 and 2017, I circulated among the two West Coast and the two East Coast sites doing fieldwork in the midst of other academic responsibilities. On the East Coast, I lived in my own apartment in New York City and made frequent trips to the other East Coast site, where I could stay with family; a sabbatical leave in 2016–17 enabled me to live near the West Coast sites with the help of Sabbaticalhomes.com and the like. As is often the way with anthropology of science projects, anthropologists become familiar to their interlocutors—not exactly colleagues and not exactly friends but a very appealing combination of the two. Like many other anthropologists, I had the status of a student in the lab and was often given jobs to do: running subjects through tasks at computers, serving as a “normal” experimental subject who provided data that could be compared to other subjects, or bringing food to contribute to innumerable social occasions in the labs.

Sociality

Since I envisioned that an important part of the project would be tracing not only the joint beginnings of anthropology and psychology, but also how they eventually definitively divided into separate disciplines, I expected most of my life inside psychology to be unfamiliar. I was struck by how many of my initial assumptions were mowed down. I had read that experimental psychology celebrated and promoted individualistic ideas, operated on the belief that people could be treated as isolated, autonomous units, and in fact perpetuated a distinctly asocial idea of the human mind. In the 1960s, George Miller had identified the strain in empiricist British thought that entered into early experimental psychology: “It is a theory about the individual mind; social implications are not considered. All minds are created free and equal. An individual mind is a private, personal thing, completely independent of all other private, personal minds and free to enter into any contracts or agreements with others that suit its own purposes.”² To think through the implications of such a focus on the individual, I relied on the work of sociologists and historians such as Nikolas Rose. Rose urges us to see how the growth of psychology since the nineteenth century was “intrinsically linked with transformations in the practices for ‘the conduct of conduct’ that have been assembled in contemporary liberal democracies.” The “conduct of conduct” refers to social guidelines for the management of subjectivity, which have become “psychologized.”³ For instance, because experimental psychological research about the human mind has been conducted with human subjects in seemingly isolated experimental settings where subjective or interpersonal elements are meant to be eliminated or controlled, the field can be said to have encouraged conceptions of human nature that fit and even amplify the demands of global capitalism, with its market-based rubrics that assume it is individuals who make choices. Habits and beliefs have been instilled that encourage people to consider themselves as individuals: individuals who are willing to calculate their well-being according to psychological traits, individuals who are willing, even eager, to devote time and energy to improving psychologically—to become happier, more flexible, and more risk tolerant.

In contrast, I knew that some research in a related field, social psychology, contests the role of the individual. Primatologist Frans DeWaal, writing about emotions among animals and humans, has welcomed the insights of the social neuroscientist Jim Coan. As DeWaal put it, “most psychologists believe that our species’ typical responses occur while we are alone. They regard the solitary human as the default condition. Coan, however, believes the exact opposite: how we feel while we are embedded with others is the actual norm. Few of us deal with life’s stresses on our own—we always rely on others.”⁴ To my amazement, the life of my fieldwork labs was vastly more social than the life of the anthropology departments I had experienced. I observed that every possible social occasion was celebrated: birthdays, new members joining, old members leaving, holidays and on and on. People brought food—family recipes for meatballs, special homemade desserts, dumplings, fruit, sushi—and the sharing of this food went along with serious discussions of ongoing research.

FIGURE 1.1. Experimental psychology lab potluck. Photo by author, 2020.

More striking, lab members were told explicitly that lab research was collaborative. Dr. J was eloquent: “We depend on each other, we help each other. When someone asks you for help running subjects or analyzing data, remember that you may need that exact kind of help some day. There is sweat equity, so if somebo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction
• 1. Doing This Ethnography
• 2. Sensing the World
• 3. Experimenting Scientifically
• 4. Normalizing Data
• 5. Delimiting Technologies
• 6. Stabilizing Subjects
• 7. Gazing Technologically
• 8. Practicing Experimental Tasks
• 9. Envisaging “Productive Thinking”
• 10. Moving beyond the Lab
• 11. Entering Social and Digital Media
• Notes
• References Cited
• Index