Technological simulacrum: psychologists’ invention of a bogus pipeline to the soul

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Notes

1. Jones and Sigall, “The Bogus Pipeline,” 349.

2. Robin, The Scientific Image, 18.

3. Exemplary of these critiques of psychology’s positivism is Toulmin and Leary, “Cult of Empiricism.”

4. Jones and Sigall, “The Bogus Pipeline,” 359.

5. See note 1 above.

6. Jones et al., “Reciprocation of Attraction,” 149.

7. Such suspicions about experimental actors, subjects and experimenters alike, increased significantly in the 1950s and 1960s. Morawski, “Epistemological Dizziness.”

8. Jones and Sigall enumerated these concerns, including the ‘generosity effect’ evaluation apprehension, experimenter demand, thoughtlessness, and ‘errors of the “psychological”.’ ‘The Bogus Pipeline.’ Before this collaboration, Sigall and Jones’ had independently investigated problems of honesty and experimental biases ensuing from subjects’ feigning and masking. Jones, Ingratiation; Sigall et al., “The Cooperative Subject”; Sigall and Page, “Current Stereotypes.” Concerns about a ‘psychology of the psychology experiment’ endangering experimental validity escalated in the 1950s and 1960s.

9. Much has been written on the postwar culture of anxious suspiciousness. An excellent analysis is given by Dolan, Allegories of America. On the regard for untruth in American culture, see Alder, “History of Untruth.” On the distrust of technology and of users of technology see Jones-Imhotep, “Maintaining Humans.” On apprehensions about patients’ compliance in medicine see Jones, “Technologies of Compliance.” For a longer history of technologies and human agency, see Mark Selzter, Bodies and Machines.

10. Donahue, ‘On Being Second Guessed,’ 26.

11. One exception is a rough line drawing of an apparatus alone. Allen, “Social Distance,” 718.

12. Smith, History of Human Sciences; Morawski, “Reflexivity of Psychologist.” In fact, ‘mechanical objectivity’ figured doubly in the bogus pipeline technique: the machine asssured subjects that their responses would be not be misinterpreted by experimenters and the quantified response questionnaire assured experimenters that their subjective understandings of subjects would not come into play in the findings. On mechanical objectivity, see Dason and Galison, Objectivity.

13. Worchel and Cooper, Understanding Social Psychology, 68. Technologies of truth need not be complex, and might be regarded as useful even in their simplest forms; several pages later a photo of a voting booth is displayed with a caption stating that the behavior performed in its ‘privacy’ is less influenced by ‘normative pressure.’ 71.

14. Morawski, “Educating the Emotions,” 224–5.

15. Golee, “Poster Power”; Lynch, “Science in the Age”; Maienschein, “From Presentation to Representation.”

16. Suchman, “Subject Objects.”

17. Baron and Byrne, Social Psychology, 133.

18. Jones and Wein, “Attitude Similarity,” 233–4.

19. Experimenters themselves attested that these technological displays signified ‘real’ science. When one bogus pipeline study found that subjects who merely saw the apparatus reduced bias similarly to those subjects who were measured by it, the researchers suggested that both subject groups had attended ‘to the science connotations of the elaborate equipment and processes,’ viewing them as ‘“serious science”.’ Hough and Allen, “Is ‘Women’s Movement’ Erasing?” 8.

20. See note 4 above; Sigall and Page, ‘Reducing Attenuation of Expression,’ 632.

21. Quigely-Fernandez and Tedeschi, “Pipeline as Lie Detector,” 249.

22. Palhaus, “Individual Differences,” 345.

23. Likewise, reception of the machine’s efficacy was often questioned, just as courts had been reluctant to permit the polygraph results as evidence in criminal trials.

24. Richards, “Psychology of Psychology.”

25. Jones and Sigall acknowledged debt to lie detector research suggesting that these devices likely work because individuals believe they are infallible. ‘The Bogus Pipeline,’ 353. On understandings of lie detection see Alder, “History of Untruth.”

26. Initial research focussed mainly on socially sensitive matters that subjects were thought to conceal.

27. Jones and Sigall, “The Bogus Pipeline,” 357.

28. One investigator, Fran Cherry, reported that upon post-experimental debriefing, some subjects refused to believe the pipeline was a fake. ‘Social Psychology and Change,’ 100–1. Other researchers similarly reported that after being informed of an apparatus’ inaccuracy, many subjects insisted that it was accurate. Brigham et al., “Attitude Measurement via Pipeline,” 112.

29. Ostrom, “New Ignis Fatuus?” 257.

30. Upon observing subjects’ confusion over real and fake, one research team suggested that the bogus pipeline technique creates rather than circumvents subjects’ socially desirable responses. Cherry et al., “Clogs in Bogus Pipeline,” 74.

31. Kiesler and Munson, “Attitudes and Opinions,” 417. Other researchers contended that pipeline advocates might be confusing constructs and the real. Byrne and Griffitt, “Interpersonal Attraction,” 319.

32. See Johnson, “Mixing Humans.”

33. Ihde, “Image Technologies.” 148. See also Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 186–209.

34. Ibid., 149.

35. Donahue, “Being Second Guessed,” 44. With methodology application predominantly focused on drug and alcohol use. Donahue and Morawski, “Technical ‘Junk’.”

36. Fazio et al., “Automatic Activation,” 1014.

37. Dumit, Picturing Personhood; Rose, Politics of Life; McCabe and Castel, “Seeing is Believing.”