Crimes in Social Science

I'm enjoying slogging through Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. It seeks to reveal how normal people do evil, with special attention to the author's own famous study: The Stanford Prison Experiment. Thirty some year later, the guy finally gets around to writing a book about it. Makes me feel more hopeful about my own procrastination.

Anyway, a passage on conformity experiments brought back my own brief days as a social scientist. For the eighth grade science fair, my scientifically superior friend WBL suggested that we replicate a famous (but not yet to me) experiment by Solomon Asch, where subjects are asked to compare the length of lines with each other, and answer which lines were the same length. The trick was that confederates of the experimenter would be taking aloud the same test at the same time, and they would conspire to answer certain predetermined questions incorrectly. The experiment would be to see how often subjects would bow to peer pressure and give the wrong answer.

Quite often, as it turned out, both for Asch and for ourselves. But I have always felt queasy about the way we did the experiment. To begin with, our "confederates" were our friends--people known to be honors students near the top of the class. And nothing was anonymous. And for some reason we didn't always use lines, but sometimes used questions that people genuinely might not know the correct answer to. And perhaps most egregiously, we failed to debrief our test subjects so that they would know what was going on. How do you suppose these friends and acquaintances of ours felt after they suspected that they had been had?

It was fun to participate in a social science experiment, and we did establish that peer pressure is indeed strong. But I fear that the exercise largely functioned as a chance for us honors student nerds to feel superior to the people we invited into our experiment. And to exert power over others with the one form of superiority that we had: test-taking skills. These people would be justified in never trusting me again.

I felt queasy at the time about this (though perhaps not as queasy as when I was buying and selling people's souls in high school). But I never spoke up or stopped the experiment. I just did a poor job at presenting it at the science fair, because I felt guilty. And reading Zimbardo's book, I feel like I was living inside Milgram's famous electric shock experiment--I was willing to cause possible harm to my peers for the sake of a silly experiment. And I did nothing to get out or stop it.

I am very suspicious of using power over people. But sometimes I do it. And it makes me sick. This is why I am not a social scientist--a weak stomach.

Lunch today was forgettable, but supper was interesting: instant rice, frozen broccoli from a nuke-in bag, chow mein noodles, and leftover generic spaghettios. I am trying to be supportive of a loved one's restricted diet. Eating without fat is remarkably difficult, though.