Experimenting with People: Making Psychology’s Subjects

Abstract

Martin, Emily. 2021. Experiments of the Mind: From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 312 pages. Can there be a more consequential science operating in contemporary Euro-American societies than experimental psychology? Psychological research is pored over by everyone from CEos working to manage their employees, to politicians who want to know how a word affects a voter’s mood, to activists working to make the embodied traumas of social injustice tangible, to web designers tasked with seeing how many seconds it takes a user to click a button. And yet the study of experimental psychology remains, at best, a backwater in medical anthropology, science and technology studies and related fields. When Emily Martin told colleagues about her new project, the subject of her 2021 book, Experiments of the Mind: From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter, they found it, she reports, “frankly, boring.” scan the online programmes of 4s, the conference of the society for social studies of science, which awarded Martin its highest prize in 2019, and there is no shortage of attention to chemicals, algorithms, animals, oceans, genomes, outer space, online markets, forensic devices. But there is precious little attention to that mundane and ubiquitous scientific practice in which an experimenter, sitting across the table from a subject, uses a prompt, an image, a game, to better understand a tiny piece of some everyday human mental process. one reason is that prestige in medical anthropology or science and technology studies often mirrors the imagined or desired prestige that attaches to the science under investigation. Psychology — old, low-tech, popular with students — doesn’t have the epistemic or institutional weight of, say, genomics or high-energy physics. Another reason is that funding opportunities can direct researchers in disciplines such as medical anthropology toward whatever it is that research managers, technology companies and venture capital firms — mostly in Northern California — deem worthy of attention. recall, for example, the sudden rush of interest around “synthetic biology” some years ago. For all of the resources poured into it, that topic and its various controversies left little presence in the social sciences. Put more plainly, psychology just isn’t