Experimental psychology on roofies - by Malmesbury
As I am writing, there is a tiny angel-version of myself suspended in mid-air over my left shoulder. His comforting voice is telling me to live a normal life and pursue happiness in normal hobbies like play-dough, warhammer or ironing. Floating over my right shoulder, a little devil-myself is telling me: “hey, you know what would be a great idea? Go on the darknet and buy some roofies!
The thing with experimental psychology is that each participant can only be tested once. For a compelling example, look at Greenstein (2020). They wanted to know if being angry makes you more gullible to misinformation. Being scientists, they performed the Scientific Method: they split their sample of participants in half – one half got a nice and professional experimenter, the other half got an absolute dickhead annoying them on purpose (“ the experimenter was disorganized, dismissive, insulting, lost documents, provided only vague instructions, created unnecessary work, and interrupted the participant”). Then, they could confirm that the angry group was indeed more sensitive to fake news.
But this statistical significance comes with a bitter price: they had to deliberately exasperate ~40 innocent undergraduates. And that’s a small study. If they really wanted solid results, they would have to recruit many more participants, and taken together this would amount to a lot of total suffering. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do one arm of the experiment on one person, obliviate them and re-use the same person for the other arm?
