An anthropologist investigates how we think about how we think by Ceridwen Dovey

An anthropologist investigates how we think about how we think

By Ceridwen Dovey December 29, 2018

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/an-anthropologist-investigates-how-we-think-about-how-we-think

One afternoon several years ago, Emily Martin, a professor emerita of anthropology at N.Y.U., filled out a personality questionnaire through an app on Facebook called This Is Your Digital Life. This was long before the app’s creator, Aleksandr Kogan, was accused of using it to harvest information from more than fifty million Facebook users and sharing it with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. (The firm allegedly offered that data, in turn, to clients, including Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.) Martin, a founder of the anthropology of science, scrutinizes scientific language and practices like other ethnographers pore over kinship diagrams. She regarded the personality quiz as a semi-relevant diversion while she immersed herself in a long-term field-work project concerning experimental psychology. She’d been drawn to the subject by the work of cognitive neuropsychologists, who put human subjects through controlled experiments in laboratory settings, testing how their brains process cognitive tasks. These labs frequently generate headline-grabbing research about supposedly universal psychological traits—that people who are more analytical are less likely to believe in God, for instance, or that we tend to see impulsive people as more honest. Martin wanted to understand how this research is done and whether the scope of experiments was changing with the advent of cheap and bountiful behavioral data, which we all shed, often unknowingly, in every one of our interactions online.

Pore: If you pore over or through information, you look at it and study it very carefully.

Kinship: Relationship; close connection

Headline-grabbing: A headline-grabbing statement or activity is one that is intended to attract a lot of attention, especially from the media. Sensationalism.

Bountiful: Provided in abundance; plentiful

Shed: To send forth or spread about; radiate; diffuse; impart

Forth: Away from

Getting research access to actual labs proved difficult, so, for a couple of years, she got her feet wet as a test subject, participating in more than fifty experiments. Many of them involved completing a simple task on a computer, then doing it again after having her emotional state altered—by being shown a disturbing picture, for example. She didn’t exactly blend in: she’s in her seventies, while most of the other participants were undergraduates, attracted by easy cash or free food. Eventually, one of the psychologists Martin met took an interest in her project and made helpful introductions. She was soon embedded in three labs: one in the Bay Area, one in Baltimore, and one in New York. She sat in on meetings, assisted with experiments, and developed relationships with principal investigators and graduate students. This is the slow-burn process that Martin’s fellow anthropologist of science Paul Rabinow calls “observing observers observing.” She wasn’t there to muckrake but to grasp what happens when the object of laboratory study is not a molecule or a rat but a human being.

Prove: If something proves to be true or to have a particular quality, it becomes clear after a period of time that it is true or has that quality.

Get feet wet: To begin to participate in something

Blend in: If someone blends into a particular group or situation, they seem to belong there, because their appearance or behaviour is similar to that of the other people involved.

Slow-burn: If something is a slow burn, or if it happens on a slow burn, it develops slowly.

Muckrake [ˈmʌkˌreɪk ]: To search for and publicize, as in newspapers, any real or alleged corruption or scandal by public figures, esp. politicians

Martin’s field work at the New York lab is now complete, but, in the spring, she paid a social visit, and I joined her. I was a graduate student of Martin’s at N.Y.U., but I hadn’t seen her in years. The lab is not far from the Upper West Side apartment she moved to with her husband, a retired biophysicist, and two unusually affectionate cats, after retiring from teaching, in 2017. Her hair is white and her gait a little cautious, but her smile remains youthfully impish. At the lab, the researchers seemed glad to see her, and Martin was clearly familiar with every inch of the place. When I admired a Japanese print on the wall, she told me that it had been selected for its resemblance to event-related potentials—the electrical brain waves made in response to specific cognitive stimuli. These are measured with electrodes placed against the scalp that amplify the faintest electrical brain signals. “Bald people are the most difficult subjects,” a researcher explained, holding up a skullcap through which needles would be lightly tapped. “They have more sweat glands, which interferes with conductivity.” Martin’s eyes lit up at the detail.

Pay a visit: To go somewhere to spend time with (someone, such as a friend or relative), to visit: He paid a visit to his parents.

Gait: Manner of walking or running;

Impish: If you describe someone or their behaviour as impish, you mean that they are rather disrespectful or naughty in a playful way.

Anthropologists love to examine the sorts of tools that are taken for granted by those in the trade but are regarded as exotic by non-specialists. In a locked room at the lab was an expensive new eye-tracking technology, which measures gaze direction and changes in pupil size as subjects respond to prompts on a screen. “Your eyes index what’s going on with you internally, your emotional state, without you saying a word,” a researcher said. Another tool that fascinates Martin is the International Affective Picture System, which was developed at the University of Florida. The I.A.P.S. provides normative ratings of emotional responses to more than a thousand photographs. (These are shared for free with scholars so long as they don’t publish or distribute the images—their value as “standardized” stimuli depends on them remaining unfamiliar to the general public.) The ratings for each image are based on the responses of a hundred University of Florida undergraduates—an image of a floppy disk has a moderately high rating on the scale of pleasant to unpleasant, for instance, perhaps owing to nostalgia, while that of a grieving woman is low. Martin scrolled through some of the images for me on her laptop: snakes eating frogs, men lifting weights, crotch shots, old ladies with birds on their heads.

Grieving: Afflicted, desolate.

Crotch: The human external genitals or the genital area and the corresponding part of a pair of trousers, pants, etc. A crotch shot it’s a quick frame that shows a human crotch covered with pants.

Martin’s freedom as an outsider to ask “naïve” and probing questions encouraged the psychologists to open up, gradually, about orthodoxies or inconsistencies in their work. One researcher said he was troubled that experiments were always designed around brief exposure to stimuli. “What would happen,” he mused to Martin, “if we lengthened the time the stimulus was exposed?” A junior researcher expressed frustration that there’s virtually nothing in the published literature about what happens after an experiment is completed, when volunteers, who may have been assigned a task that was designed to make them feel stupid or upset, are debriefed.

Naïve: If you describe someone as naive, you think they lack experience and so expect things to be easy or people to be honest or kind.

Probing: To make a searching exploratory investigation

Brief: Short

Debriefed: When someone such as a soldier, diplomat, or astronaut is debriefed, they are asked to give a report on an operation or task that they have just completed.

While she’s in field-work mode, Martin is always alert to what she calls these “ethnographic moments.” Even the smallest action or fragment of speech, she believes, can be a useful clue to the mostly invisible wider cultural assumptions that shape how research is done in any specialized field. She observes and collects these fragments, hoping that, later on, she’ll be able to find connections between them and make better sense of a scientific world view that is fascinatingly foreign to her.

Doing ethnographic field work in one’s own culture—and in non-traditional sites like laboratories—is an accepted practice today, but it wasn’t when Martin was introduced to anthropology, as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, in the sixties. She went there intending to major in chemistry, but her roommate brought her to an ethnomusicology class, where the professor explained that Japanese Noh music was not structured around harmony or mechanical rhythm but around an elastic pattern. “No conductor, but breathing together,” she recalls him saying. Martin was hooked. “It’s actually the perfect analogy for what happens in field work,” she told me. “Noise to music via seeing things from another culture’s point of view.”

Noise to music: From noise to music

She has since realized that there was a deeper reason for her attraction to anthropology. “It is a version of naming the elephant in the room when I was growing up,” she said. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, near the end of the Second World War. Her father had been posted to the Pacific theatre, and she didn’t see him until she was two. He returned profoundly disturbed by his war experience, and he was sexually inappropriate with Martin throughout her childhood. “My dad’s behavior was a huge problem but never spoken of. My symptoms of distress were blamed on anything else—a high fever, growing pains. To see the obvious and not be able to identify it was awful.” Her mother, in what Martin now thinks of as a “rescue gesture,” sent her to board at the Kingswood School in Cranbrook, Michigan, which she remembers as a wonderland. “Anthropology allows me to see things that might be obvious but usually remain hidden, in a variety of settings, and put them into words,” she said. “What a relief.”

Post: Send

Blame on: To ascribe responsibility for (something) to

She went to graduate school at Cornell and did her earliest field work in Taiwan, gathering villagers’ views on hepatitis during an epidemic of the disease. It was only years later, when she was pregnant with her second daughter and teaching in a new anthropology department at Johns Hopkins, that she began to think about doing field work in America. Every few months, she and a fledgling group—Susan Harding, who was studying Jerry Falwell’s megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia; Harriet Whitehead, who was doing research on Scientology; Lorna Rhodes, who was writing about the psychiatric clinic in which she worked—met at Martin’s Baltimore row house, “trying to figure out how in the world you do anthropological field work in your own culture.” At childbirth classes, Martin tentatively interviewed other pregnant women; she scoured textbooks on obstetrics and gynecology. She began to see that women giving birth “were being held to standards of production, time management, efficiency” analogous to criteria in manufacturing. The language used about menstrual discharge in textbooks was that of the “ruined debris of failure”; the post-menopausal body was described like an “outmoded factory.” Yet the lived experience of the women with whom she was spending time often contested these medical pronouncements. She wrote a book, “The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction,” which considered how a society built on other principles might value women’s bodies differently.

Fledgling: You use fledgling to describe a person, organization, or system that is new or without experience. A fledgling is a young bird that has its feathers and is learning to fly.

Row house: A row house is one of a row of similar houses that are joined together by both of their side walls.

Scour: If you scour something such as a place or a book, you make a thorough search of it to try to find what you are looking for.

Hold / held / held: If one thing holds another in a particular position, it keeps it in that position.

Debris: Debris is pieces from something that has been destroyed or pieces of rubbish or unwanted material that are spread around.

Meanwhile, in the evenings, she listened closely as her husband, Richard Cone, described his lab’s efforts to develop a gel that could prevent both conception and S.T.D.s. “Why do you talk about sperm as if they’re all male, and the egg as if it’s female, though it could make a boy or a girl?” she asked him. (“While most families discuss their days at work, or lessons learned in school, we would often discuss the acidic properties of vaginal fluids, or the path taken by sperm,” their daughter Ariel once recalled, in a piece about her father’s research.) The standard narrative of conception struck Martin as an old-fashioned romantic saga: the passive female egg waiting for the male sperm to shoot out and rescue it. Spurred by Martin’s questions, Cone and his students took another look and found that they had it wrong. Sperm have quite weak motive power—their sideways thrust is more forceful than their forward thrust—and the sticky surface of the egg “captures the sperm like flypaper captures a fly,” as Cone put it to me. Martin wrote an article, “The Egg and the Sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles,” which was published in 1991 and became a cult feminist classic.

Motive power: An impelling force (força motriu, fuerza motriz)

Sideways thrust: Moving or directed to or from one side. If you thrust something or someone somewhere, you push or move them there quickly with a lot of force.

Forward thrust: If you move or look forward, you move or look in a direction that is in front of you. In British English, you can also move or look forwards. The suffix –ward means direction, to.

Through all this, Martin was fighting a private battle with depression and, later, manic depression, her preferred term for bipolar disorder. In the late nineties, she decided to use her own experiences, alongside ethnographic methods, to investigate how the condition was understood in the U.S., both by people living with the diagnosis and those involved in treating them, from medical-school trainees to pharmaceutical employees. She also wanted to explore how mania had become increasingly prized in American life. Mania’s “unremitting energy, little need for sleep, and immense drive to throw things—money, social connections—into circulation” was often idealized as a creative state necessary for success in a ruthlessly competitive system, she wrote in “Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture,” which she published in 2007. In the book, Martin observes how people wield the labels handed down to them from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a “cloak against further scrutiny,” a means of using standardized categories to avoid sharing more intimate or divergent psychic experiences. In one of the first support groups that she attended, Martin talked about the vivid images that she sometimes hallucinated, the way “the visual field in front of my eyes became rent as if it were a movie screen being ripped and torn.” The rest of the group looked at her as if she were crazy. A few told her privately afterward that they would never share something like that.

Mania: An obsessional enthusiasm or partiality. Mania is a mental illness which causes the sufferer to become very worried or concerned about something.

Ruthlessly: If you say that someone is ruthless, you mean that you disapprove of them because they are very harsh or cruel, and will do anything that is necessary to achieve what they want.

Wield: If you wield a weapon, tool, or piece of equipment, you carry and use it. If someone wields power, they have it and are able to use it.

Cloak ( kloʊk ): A cloak is a long, loose, sleeveless piece of clothing which people used to wear over their other clothes when they went out.

Loose: Something that is loose is not firmly held or fixed in place.

Became rent: A hole or gap made by rending or tearing, as a torn place in cloth, a fissure in the earth, etc

Ripped and torn: Ripped is the same than torn. If you tear paper, cloth, or another material, or if it tears, you pull it into two pieces or you pull it so that a hole appears in it.

Martin found that when people switch psychotropic medications, which she herself takes, they often feel as if they have to reshape their identities around the new drug—one informant told her that she disliked switching because of the work of “integrating something new into your old identity,” which took away from the “magic of the first drug” you took. She spent time with marketers, listening to how they described the “personality” design of particular psychotropic medications. The C.E.O. of one ad agency told her that, after Bill Clinton became President, two companies, with two different drugs, decided that they wanted their drug to be like Hillary Clinton: strong, tough, knows what she wants, but with “that feminine sort of feeling to it.” Martin also observed how marketers made appeals to psychiatrists’ artistic sides: a Lithium-P campaign featured a portrait of Beethoven and an offer for doctors of a free CD of the Ninth Symphony, taking for granted “cultural associations between manic depression and creative energy.”

At a conference mostly attended by psychiatrists, Martin recalls being criticized over a passage in her book that delves into people’s ambivalence about taking lithium, one of the few psychotropic drugs that is not advertised directly to patients. People either see it as the most “natural” of the drugs, Martin writes, or they fiercely resist taking it, “loath to have the pleasures of a rising mood taken away from them.” Some psychiatrists believe lithium is now under-prescribed because both doctors and patients are attracted to newer, supposedly “technologized” medicines, and, at the conference, Martin was accused of contributing to this problem. “To me, this was ethnographic data,” she said, frustrated by the misperceptions of what anthropology entails. “I wasn’t saying I agreed with them.”

Recall: When you recall something, you remember it and tell others about it.

Delve into: If you delve into something, you try to discover new information about it.

Loathe: If you loathe something or someone, you dislike them very much.

Entail: To have as a necessary consequence

For Martin, field work “has never felt like a marathon, more like the ascent of a peak.” This doesn’t mean that the trail is always clearly marked. “For ages, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing or why. I drive my family nuts. Wandering around clueless. But I just have this conviction that if I keep going, something will fall into place.” Often, it’s only when the field work is finished that she sees broader patterns. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, in March, as she was writing up seven years of her experimental psychology research, she wondered if she had learned something about why social-media users would willingly complete personality questionnaires designed by psychologists, as she had done. The public’s growing anxiety about big data also made her think of the immense amounts of information collected by eye-tracking technologies, which had burst into wider use near the end of her field work, amassing data so far in excess of what was usable in experiments that the lab researchers were dumping it into open-access data banks.

To drive someone nut: Turn someone crazy

Willing: Voluntary, eager, keen

Early on in the work, she’d taken another personality quiz, through a different app on Facebook: myPersonality, which, in August, became the second app, after This Is Your Digital Life, to be banned by Facebook. The company determined that the app’s creators had been careless with the data they collected. The app’s founder, David Stillwell, and his collaborator Michal Kosinski, deny this, insisting that they asked all six million myPersonality participants for consent to access their Facebook data, that they turned down every lucrative offer to purchase their data, and that Facebook itself had been supportive of the project for years. Among those who later had access to their data was Aleksandr Kogan, the man behind This Is Your Digital Life, and a colleague of theirs at Cambridge University. But they claim that Kogan did not use their data in his work for S.C.L., the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Martin pointed me to a statement published by Stillwell and Kosinski in May, before the ban, which explains why it has become so tempting to researchers to scale up psychology experiments in the digital era: “While psychology research is often conducted on undergraduates in a lab setting, we feel that the digital revolution has opened new vistas for scholars interested in understanding human beings,” they wrote.

Exactly how illuminating it is to match digital data with psychometric profiles is up for debate: the app wrongly identified Martin, based on her answers, as a thirty-five-year-old male—though it did correctly describe her as “introspective.” Some of the researchers’ findings are intriguingly absurd: Facebook likes of “thunderstorms” and “curly fries” supposedly correlated with high intelligence, for instance. While giving evidence to British M.P.s, in April, Kogan said that the personality scores his app created were “highly inaccurate.” Nonetheless, Martin speculates that there’s “a feedback loop between these tools that have become commonplace and how we see ourselves.” Perhaps they produce “people who are willing to consider themselves as lone individual agents,” obedient to the authority of the scientist who says, “Take this survey, or take this lab test, and I will tell you who you are.” The wider field of cognitive neuropsychology is also currently grappling with a “reproducibility” crisis: in August, the Center for Open Science released a scathing report showing that a large number of the findings from social-science papers published in Nature and Science could not be replicated, including the original studies that popularized the idea that impulsivity is perceived as inherently more honest and that more analytical people are less likely to believe in God.

The book that Martin is writing will be structured as an open dialogue between an anthropologist and a cast of experimental psychologists, to reflect the collaborative nature of the project, and as an expression of scholarly humility, in not giving herself the final say. As a graduate student at one of the labs said, “I didn’t see her as doing work on me, but rather learning about the process of experimentation with me.” This doesn’t mean, however, that Martin is shy about celebrating the contributions social anthropologists can make to understanding the complexities of culture. In November, at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, Martin delivered the distinguished lecture—one of the highest recognitions in the field, honoring a lifetime of exemplary scholarship. Anthropologists have “worked so hard to identify alternative visions of human purpose,” she said to the audience. “Now it is time to shout them from the rooftops.”

Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the short-story collection “Only the Animals” and the novels “Blood Kin” and “In the Garden of the Fugitives.”

Born 1980, she’s a South African and Australian social anthropologist and author.