Trust

Reference 1 featured in several posts over the winter just past, as search for 'Bargh' will reveal. I got about half way through his book before wandering off somewhere else in the spring, and yesterday I picked it up again.

This morning I read, not for the first time, of some mind experiments which university researchers do with university students, often drawn from their own department. In order for these experiments to work, to cast light on otherwise dark areas of the mind, the researchers need to pretend to the students that the experiments are about one thing when actually they are about some quite different thing.

So in this particular case, one tells the students that one is interested in what they are saying about a pile of photographs set out on a table, when actually one is secretly filming the unconscious movements of their feet, movements which might well be damped or blocked if the students knew that this was the real subject of the experiment.

Which makes me a bit uneasy. No doubt one is advancing the cause of science, but one is not advancing the cause of trust. The convenient and comfortable arrangement whereby we can trust what people in positions of power and authority tell us. A comfortable and convenient arrangement which is under sustained attack. Thank you, Mr. Blair (among others).

But hopefully we can trust the ethics committees which have oversight of university research to strike the right balance here. I have no such trust in our House of Commons.

Reference 1: Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do - John Bargh – 2017.