Review of Emily Martin, Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021)
Maarten Derksen (Theory & History of Psychology, University of Groningen)
Experiments of the mind is the result of a ten year-long project studying experimental psychology ethnographically, as a participant-observer in four laboratories. Emily Martin sat in on lab meetings, interviewed researchers, participated in experiments, and even tried her hand at running them. It has resulted in a book that contains many insightful observations.
Martin went into this study with an admirably open mind. Whereas her anthropology colleagues’ thought experimental psychology is a boring topic, she realized that the project of experimental psychology — to produce objective knowledge stripped of the subjectivity that both researchers and experimental subjects bring to the process — is fascinating, whether or not you think it is a worthwhile thing to strive for. Her open-mindedness allowed Martin to make the familiar strange: to alert the reader to aspects of experimental psychological practice that seem unremarkable or do not get noted at all.
To her surprise, studying the individual mind is an intensely social activity. The culture of experimental psychology is one of collaboration, mutual support, and frequent informal gatherings (much more so than in anthropology, she notes). In fact, Martin seems to have found especially social and collaborative labs. Not only are the psychologists who she studied without exception presented as very nice people (as becomes clear from the ‘dramatis personae’ that the book opens with), there is also an almost complete absence of conflict and competition. The labs are friendly, wholesome places, and there seems to be no scarcity. The post docs do not worry about finding another position after their current contract ends. There are no complaints about reviewer two, and the researchers do not struggle to get their work published or to get funding for the next project. This remarkable state of affairs would have merited more reflection, because such aspects of academic life are part and parcel of the production of knowledge.
The social nature of experimental psychology, Martin emphasizes, does not only lie in the relations between researchers. The experiments that are conducted are themselves thoroughly social events. Good experimenters care for their subjects’ well-being, if only because a subject who is bored or in pain does not produce good data. Moreover, experimenters socialize their subjects to become part of their world by training and instructing them so that they can play a role as good subjects. Experiments start by giving the subject instructions, usually followed by a brief practice round. Paradoxically, producing objective knowledge requires a carefully prepared subject. Martin also notices the importance of the virtually omnipresent pieces of furniture in psychological laboratories: a table and a chair for physically stabilising the subject. In this respect they serve the same function as the fixation point that controls the gaze of the subject, and which is an equally common device in experimental psychology. Ironically, Martin herself was a terrible subject, plagued by performance anxiety and constantly second-guessing the intentions of the experimenter. Time and again experimenters had to reassure her that her poor performance was not a problem, and if her data were too unusual they would simply be discarded.
Despite the researchers’ best efforts at disciplining their participants, and despite the devices (EEG, fMRI, eye-trackers) they have at their disposal to measure responses, producing data is not a smooth, automatic process. In a wonderful chapter titled ‘Gazing technologically’ Martin describes the human interventions, the judgment, the social relations it requires to keep the machinery running and bridge the gaps that inevitably fall between the experiment as intended and its actual realisation. She closes this chapter by saying that psychologists’ training and methods ignore these gaps between ideal and practice, but that does not do justice to the work she has just described so well: these gaps are a constant concern for researchers. This is one of several places where her analysis seems a bit off the mark to me. Another example concerns the training of participants. This, Martin writes, is an example of ‘problems and methods passing one another by’, as Wittgenstein famously remarked about psychology. The methods, in Martin’s view, circle around the problem, the cognitive experiences of the subjects, picking out statistically significant findings. But it seems more to the point to say that a particular version of the problem is being enacted by the method. Problem and method do not pass each other by as ships in the night. On the contrary, training and stabilising the subjects is part of creating a particular coupling of problem and method. In the process, the conscious experiences of the subjects disappear from view, only becoming visible if they destabilize this particular enactment of the research topic.
As the title of the book indicates, Martin has followed psychological theories and techniques from the lab into the world of social media. In the last two chapters Martin tries to show that companies like Meta/Facebook and Twitter.inc rely on psychological paradigms to attract users and keep them clicking on the links to their advertisers. They have turned us all into psychological subjects, unwittingly being manipulated and experimented on, and filling in the same kind of questionnaires as the participants in the lab. Unfortunately, this is not the best part of the book. Some of the links and resemblances that she tries to show between experimental psychology and the practices of Twitter and Facebook are just not there. As she acknowledges herself, Facebook doesn’t care whether you are standing up, lying down, or sitting down, whereas the subject in psychology experiments must be stabilized, immobilized to produce good data. Neither are the users of social media trained like the participants in experiments. The algorithms that platforms like Facebook employ are trained, as Martin notes, but they are not the users of the technology. Finally, it seems questionable whether participants in psychological laboratories ‘willingly’ provide data, as Martin writes. They are usually paid or compensated with course credit after all, unlike the users of social media. These differences are just as interesting as the commonalities between psychological and social media practices that Martin is intent to point out. Ultimately, however, the impression that this book leaves is shaped not by these two chapters, but by Martin’s many fascinating observations about the social production of psychological findings.