Valerie Tobias
Madeline Topf, with a pen and handwriting part of the design.
I am a microbiologist. Last month, I went under the microscope.
I was hooked up to wires, a band tightened around my waist. I was asked to take off my button-down so all I had was a crop top, which was pulled up to accommodate one of the wire’s nodes. I was weighed, measured and put through a series of tests. I signed up because I’m a poor graduate student and it was a paid study: two sessions for $25 and a bonus $25 if I completed the between-visit homework of tracking my screen time. Easy. I believed the study was researching mental health in some way. I was interested, optimistic that I’d be part of something that would help people.
I couldn’t grasp what the study was measuring, even after the release form was read to me, as if I were a child, over the course of 20 minutes. They told me there was going to be a “stress test.” They told me “some of the information we tell you about the study will be misleading,” and that I’d have to wait until after my second visit to know the truth.
But I’m a scientist. I knew the set-up: there’s a treatment group and a control group. I knew they might try to trick and surprise me, so I could be examined without my biases getting in the way. What is the misleading information? What is the trick?
The small room where the study took place was made of one-way mirrors. I could be seen, but I could not see. After I completed a series of introductory questionnaires, a voice spoke to me through the wall. I jumped, because I had forgotten. I was being watched.
“You may now begin the next portion of the study. You will be rating the faces that appear on the screen, on a scale of one to four, one meaning very unpleasant and four meaning very pleasant. Do not think too much. Click the first number that comes to mind.”
I could imagine the results being read on some podcast episode on human behavior. “People rated faces as less pleasant when….” Is this the trick? I wasn’t going to fall for it. The first face appeared on the screen. I clicked three. The next, three. People deserve to be rated as “pleasant” — but let’s not get carried away. I sped through the faces. Three, three, three, three, three. “Face pleasantness” is too loaded, I thought. What does it even mean to rate a human face without “thinking too much,” I thought, thinking too much.
After the face rating, I was ushered into a larger room. At the center stood a tall microphone, a camera pointed directly at it. I was told to stand in front of the microphone while the camera was adjusted; they were recording me for later. This was the stress test. What is the trick? Am I going to have to save someone’s life, or speak up when someone says something awful? Are they going to make me break down, cry?
Naturally, I thought of the Milgram experiment. There the victim was an actor and the shocks were not real. Ordinary people, the study concluded, will act beyond their morals to obey authority figures in white coats. A later interpretation by social psychologist Clifford Stott posited that people were willing to harm for the purpose of a greater good: scientific research. “It’s about what they believe science to be, that science is a positive product, [that] it produces beneficial findings and knowledge to society that are helpful. There’s a sense of science providing [a] system for good.”
After getting my baseline pulse, heart rate, and, I’m guessing, sweat rate measurements, they asked me to rate on a piece of paper how stressed out I was. The paper had a horizontal scale from “not stressed” to “very stressed.” I stared directly into the camera, then notched the line at “not stressed.” I was lying.
Then I was asked to prepare a five-minute speech as if I were running for public office. “Like anything, like senator,” they said. Two others in white lab coats glided into the room and sat down. They stared at me. Is this the trick?
“Well, um,” I began, “I’ll be running for city council in Madison.” The two white coats were young; I could know them. I could be embarrassing myself in front of them. I mumbled, quietly, half-heartedly, about trash in my neighborhood, about my dog, about rent being too expensive. I trailed off. I had two and a half more grueling minutes but I didn’t want to be there anymore. Could I leave? I had become the lab rat, spinning on my wheel, while the white coats watched.
I stood laughing nervously, awkward. The two white coats said nothing, kept staring. When the time was up, the white coats scribbled notes. One walked over and pretended to turn off the camera. They were bad actors. I knew then I was not being recorded. The microphone was plugged into nothing. This stress test was supposed to make me stressed and I fell for it. I was upset that I was so affected by something so obviously contrived. What possible cause and effect were they hoping to find?
I was brought back into the one-way-mirror room. I had to run through the human face rating test again. Three, three, three, three, three. I had to listen to beeps and match if the beeps were faster or slower than other beeps. I had to match beeps with my heartbeat, which I could not hear, though I was alive. After three hours, the test was over. They unhooked the wires. I felt used, tired, embarrassed.
I still don’t know what the trick was. I never went back to find out.
Madeline Topf is a Ph.D. student studying microbiology at UW-Madison. She is an organizer for the UW-Madison graduate student union (TAA, AFT Local 3220).
If you are interested in writing a personal essay for Isthmus, query Lindaf@isthmus.com.
