Elephants on Acid

by Boese, Alex

  The study itself is too weird, trivial and frivolous to be interesting. Who cares what the result is to such a silly question, posed in such a stranger-to-stranger way in the middle of the FSU quadrangle? I mean, who cares other than Redbook, Mademoiselle, Glamour, or Self—all of which would cream their jeans to get hold of this study. This study lacks redeeming social value.

  Finally, just when the authors were about to give up, the Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality accepted it. Clark and Hatfield then had their revenge. The article generated a huge amount of interest, both from the mainstream media and within the academic community. In 2003 the journal Psychological Inquiry hailed the study as a “new classic.”

  The reason for the experiment’s continuing popularity is that it dramatically highlights the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. These attitudes appear to be quite stable over time. Clark repeated the experiment in 1982 and 1990 with virtually identical results.

  Why do women say no, and men say yes? Clark considered this a sociobiological legacy. Women, he argued, evolved to be more selective about mates because they could only conceive a limited number of children. They needed to be sure about the father. Men, on the other hand, could father an unlimited number of children, so it was a better strategy for them to be always ready and willing. Many critics disagree. They argue either that these attitudes are merely socially learned behavior, or that the women said no because they deemed the invitation too risky. Clark counters that half the 47women were willing to go on a date with a total stranger. This may indicate that their behavior was motivated less by fear than by a desire to have more time to assess the potential mate.

  Whatever the reason for the differing attitudes, the difference itself appears to be real enough (assuming things haven’t changed much since 1990). For this reason, your average man should realize that if a beautiful stranger ever does approach him out of the blue on a college campus and invite him to have sex with her, the appropriate response is not “I’d love to,” but “Who is conducting this experiment?”

  Counting Pubic Hairs

  During the mid-1990s six employees at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences received an unusual homework assignment. Each was to go home, have sex with his spouse, and, immediately following intercourse, place a swabby towel beneath the buttocks of his partner and thoroughly comb her pubic hair. This wasn’t a lesson in postcoital grooming. The point was to collect any fallen hairs on the towel for later examination. The employees were voluntary participants in an experiment to determine the frequency of pubic hair transfer during intercourse.

  Forensic scientists had long been trained to search for foreign pubic hairs on victims of sexual assault. Such hairs, if found, can serve as valuable evidence, either implicating or 48ruling out suspects. But what forensic scientists didn’t know was whether it was actually common for pubic hairs to transfer between partners during intercourse. Should they expect to find transferred pubic hairs frequently, or infrequently? It was the kind of question only a strange experiment could answer.

  The Alabama researchers collected 110 pubic-hair-bearing towels from the six couples over a period of a few months. They carefully examined all of them and identified a grand total of 334 pubic hairs, as well as seven head hairs, twenty body hairs, and one animal hair. We won’t speculate about where the animal hair came from.

  Foreign pubic hairs (i.e., hairs transferred from a spouse) were present on only nineteen of the towels. This gave a fairly low transfer rate of 17.3 percent. The transfer of hairs from women to men proved more than twice as common as the transfer of hairs from men to women. No sexual position appeared to cause significantly more hair transfer than any other position.

  Given that the hair collection occurred under ideal circumstances, immediately following intercourse, the researchers determined that, in most cases of sexual assault, pubic-hair transfer probably does not occur. Therefore, “Failure to find transferred pubic hairs does not indicate that intercourse did not occur.” These results remain the cutting edge (or should we say shedding edge?) of pubic-hair-transfer science.

  The Penis Imagined as

  a Sperm-Shoveling Scoop

  The pursuit of knowledge can take researchers to many exotic, out-of-the-way locations—the depths of the ocean, inside the craters of volcanoes, the surface of the moon. In the case of Gordon Gallup, it took him to the Hollywood Exotic Novelties sex store, where he obtained a latex phallus and an artificial vagina. These were strictly for business, not pleasure.

  Back at his lab at the State University of New York at Albany, Gallup whipped up some fake semen. The recipe, for those curious, was 7 milliliters of room-temperature water mixed with 7.16 grams of cornstarch and stirred for five minutes. This produced a substance “judged by three sexually experienced males to best approximate the viscosity and texture of human seminal fluid.”

  Gallup and his team carefully poured the fake semen into the artificial vagina. Then they fully inserted the latex phallus. They repeated this procedure with phalluses of different sizes and semen of varying consistency.

  It wasn’t sex-ed day at the lab. The point of all this simulated intercourse was to examine the fluid dynamics of sperm inside the vagina. Gallup theorized that the head of the human penis had evolved its distinctive shape to serve as a kind of semen scoop. This morphology, he argued, would have conferred an evolutionary advantage to a man if he had intercourse with a woman shortly after another man. His penis would scoop out the sperm of his rival and replace it with his own sperm.

  Gallup’s tests confirmed that the penis indeed scoops sperm from the vagina quite effectively. When a penis was fully inserted into the artificial vagina, “semen flowed back under the penis through the frenulum and then collected over the top of the anterior shaft behind the coronal ridge.” When pulled out, the penis brought with it as much as 90 percent of the sperm.

  Gallup’s theory stirred up controversy. Critics pointed out that if the penis does work as a scoop, then continued thrusting after ejaculation would be evolutionarily disadvantageous. The man would simply scoop out his own sperm. Gallup countered by noting the existence of a number of biological mechanisms that inhibit postejaculatory thrusting, such as penile hypersensitivity, loss of erection, and the refractory period (the postcoital period during which hormones temporarily shut down the male sexual response).

  Gallup was no stranger to controversy. In 2002 he had made headlines when he announced the results of a study indicating semen may act as an antidepressant. Of the 293 women who participated in his study, those whose partners did not use condoms scored higher, on average, on tests assessing happiness than women whose partners did use condoms. Gallup was quick to note that these results should not be taken as a recommendation for abandoning the use of condoms. Contracting a sexual disease, after all, could prove extremely depressing.

  Considering Gallup’s two studies together, you might get the idea that the penis is rather like an ice-cream scoop. After all, both are scoops that deliver viscous antidepressants. But there is one huge difference: What the ice-cream scoop 49delivers may make you happy and enlarge your belly, but it won’t make you pregnant.

  Mommy Likes Clowns

  Couples have been known to do many unusual things to increase their odds of conceiving a child—having sex only in certain positions, timing their lovemaking to the phases of the moon, and sometimes resorting to making the guy wear heated underwear. But what about hiring a clown? Not to be a sperm donor, but to entertain the woman. If the results of a recent study are to be believed, it might be worth a try.

  Dr. Shevach Friedler arranged for women undergoing in vitro fertilization embryo-transfer procedures at the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Israel to enjoy a “personal encounter with a professional medical clown.” The clown performed the same bedside act for all the women. Dressed as a character called Chef Shlomi Algussi, he did magic tricks and told jokes.

  Thirty-three of the ninety-three women who re
ceived the clown therapy conceived. This was a success rate of 35.5 percent. By contrast, only eighteen of ninety-three women who didn’t meet Chef Shlomi conceived—a significantly lower rate of 19 percent. The clown literally worked magic with the patients. Friedler concluded, “Medical clowning has been shown as an original, effective adjunctive intervention having a beneficial effect upon outcome of IVF-ET.”

  50Friedler himself had studied mime in France before becoming a doctor. This gave him the idea for the clown therapy. He suspected humor might relieve some of the stress the women were experiencing, and thus boost their odds of getting pregnant.

  Of course, women who suffer from coulrophobia—a fear of clowns and mime artists—should probably avoid the use of medical clowning. Unless, that is, they hope to benefit from its contraceptive possibilities.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Oh, Baby!

  Experimenters love babies—partly because babies are cute and smell good, but mostly because babies make fascinating research subjects. They allow experimenters to get a glimpse of the human mind in its original state, before the world has left its mark. So there’s no shortage of odd situations infants have been placed in for the sake of science. The experimental appeal of newborns dates all the way back to the seventh century BC when King Psammetichus I ruled Egypt. Psammetichus believed his people were the most ancient in the world, but the Phrygians also claimed this title. To settle the dispute, Psammetichus devised an experiment. He confined two infants to an isolated cottage. Every day a shepherd fed and cared for them, but never uttered a word. Psammetichus reasoned that the first word the children spoke would be the original, natural language of humankind. Two years passed, then one day the shepherd opened the door and heard the children shouting “becos.” The shepherd informed the king, who inquired what this meant. He was told “becos” was the Phrygian word for bread. Therefore, Psammetichus yielded the claim of greater antiquity to the Phrygians. However, modern scholars have suggested that—assuming the story is true—the children were possibly mimicking the sounds of the sheep and goats the shepherd tended and the shepherd simply misunderstood their cries. Appropriately, this would make Psammetichus’s study not only one of the first experiments in recorded history, but also one of the first examples of experimental error.

  Little Albert and the Rat

  The Harriet Lane Nursery Home, 1919. An attractive young woman releases a rat onto a mattress. The rat twitches its nose, sniffing the air. Then it scurries across the fabric toward a pudgy, round-faced infant. “Little Albert, look at the rat,” the woman says. Albert gurgles and reaches out his hand. His fingers brush the rat’s fur. At that instant—BANG!—a middle-aged man standing behind the child smashes a hammer against a steel bar. The sound rings out like a gunshot. Albert flinches with shock. He sucks in his breath, his lips tremble, and he begins to cry.

  The man with the hammer was John Broadus Watson, a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Depending on whom you ask, he was either senselessly scaring a child or conducting an experiment that would revolutionize modern psychology.

  The purpose of the experiment was simple. Watson hoped to find out whether he could make eleven-month-old Albert fear a white rat. Why he wanted to do this was a little more complicated.

  Let’s begin with the experiment itself. When Watson first met Albert—or Little Albert, as he became popularly known—the young boy didn’t fear many things. Watson described him as “stolid and unemotional” and “extremely phlegmatic.” When presented with a variety of objects—a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, a Santa mask, a burning newspaper—Albert stared at them, showing little reaction.

  Watson set out to break down Albert’s stoutheartedness and teach him fear. During the first experimental session, Watson’s assistant, a graduate student named Rosalie Rayner, showed Albert a rat. Twice Albert reached out to touch it, and each time Watson struck the hammer against the bar. Albert started violently when he heard the jarring sound, but he didn’t cry. Not yet.

  The experimenters gave Albert a break for a week, then brought him back for more. Again and again they showed Albert the rat and hit the steel bar as soon as he touched the animal. Pretty soon Albert grew wary of the rat. He was learning to associate it with the scary noise. But he didn’t easily give in to fear. Instead, he stubbornly stuck his thumb in his mouth and tried to ignore the experimenters. Frustrated, Watson pulled the child’s thumb out of his mouth, showed him the rat again, and then—BANG!—hit the bar.

  After repeating this process seven times, Watson and Rayner finally achieved the desired result. Albert took one look at the rat and, without the bar having been struck, burst into tears. He had learned to fear the rodent.

  Over the next month and a half, Watson and Rayner periodically retested Albert. His fear of the rat not only remained—though they did refresh his memory of the scary noise a few times—but also spread to similar objects he hadn’t feared before. The brave little boy had become a coward. He now whimpered and cried when presented with a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, cotton wool, a Santa mask, and even Watson’s hair.

  Watson had hoped to reverse the process, removing Albert’s newly acquired fears, but he never got the chance. Albert’s mother, who worked at the nursery as a wet nurse, left and took her son with her. Nothing is known of what became of the boy.

  Watson’s fear-reversal technique would have consisted of teaching Albert to associate the rat with pleasurable sensations. Watson wrote that he could have achieved this in a number of ways. For instance, he could have given Albert candy whenever Albert saw the rat, or he could have manually stimulated the child’s erogenous zones in the presence of the rat. “We should try first the lips, then the nipples and as a final resort the sex organs,” Watson noted. Perhaps it’s just as well Albert got out of there when he did.

  So what exactly did Watson think he was achieving by teaching an infant to fear a rat? It was all part of his attempt to make psychology less philosophical and more scientific. Psychologists, he felt, spent too much time pondering vague, ambiguous things like emotions, mental states, and the subconscious. He wanted psychologists to focus on measurable, visible behaviors, such as the relationship between stimulus and response. Something happens to a person (a stimulus occurs) and the person responds in a certain way. Action A causes Response B. All very quantifiable and scientific. In Watson’s mind, there was no need for patients to lie on a couch and talk about their feelings. Instead, by studying the stimulus-response interaction, scientists could learn how to control human behavior. It was just a matter of applying the right stimulus to trigger the desired response. He once famously boasted:

  Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

  Watson designed the Little Albert study to prove that a simple stimulus, such as banging on a steel bar, could produce a wide range of complex emotions in a child—namely, fear of rats, dogs, rabbits, wool, hair, fur coats, and Santa Claus. The experiment was a deliberate swipe at Freudian psychology, which, Watson sneered, would probably have attributed Albert’s fears to repressed sexual urges.

  Watson made his case well, and behaviorism, as he named his approach, became a dominant school in psychological research for the next fifty years. Which is why many would call the Little Albert experiment revolutionary. Many others, however, argue that while the experiment may have been good drama, it was bad science and didn’t prove anything, except that any child will cry if you harass him enough.

  Watson would have liked to continue his infant studies, but he never had the chance. His wife smelled a rat and found out his affair with his graduate student assistant, Rosalie Rayner. The judge in the subsequent divorce proceedings remarked
that the doctor was apparently an expert in misbehavior. Because of the scandal, Watson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins.

  Lurid rumors would later suggest Watson was not only sleeping with Rayner, but also using her as a subject in various sex experiments, measuring physiologic responses such as her pulse rate as he made love to her. This is offered 51as the true reason for Watson’s dismissal—the story being that his wife discovered his records of this research. However, there is no good evidence to substantiate such gossip. Watson frequently did express an interest in studying the human sexual response, but if he had conducted such experiments, he probably would have mentioned them to someone. After all, he wasn’t one to shy away from the frank discussion of sexuality.

  Blacklisted by academia, Watson headed to Madison Avenue and the lucrative world of advertising. There he put his stimulus-response theories to great effect, introducing techniques that are used to this day. He designed successful ad campaigns for coffee, baby powder, and toothpaste, among other items. Watson figured that getting a consumer to perform a desired action, such as buying a product, was simply a matter of applying the correct stimulus. One stimulus that invariably worked was sex. If Watson could have reached out and directly stimulated consumers’ erogenous zones, he would have. Instead he had to settle for visual arousal. So the next time you see bikini babes selling beer, know that you have John Watson to thank.

  Self-Selection of Diet by Infants