An anthropologist investigates how we think
about how we think
By Ceridwen
Dovey December 29, 2018
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.
