Short abstract:

A dramaturgical analysis of a celebrated experimental scene in cognitive neuroscience research illustrates how a mistrust of the experimental subject shaped logics and methods for social psychology--and subsequently cognitive neuroscience--experimental design.

Long abstract:

To The Things, Them Cells!

Pannill Camp (2007) suggested that the 18th century development of proscenium theatres shaped subsequent models for apperception and consciousness. Theatre architectures where the proscenium—the “first frame”—was designed to vanish in the perception and experience of an audience have been particularly evocative in drawing my attention to elements of laboratory experiments that are designed to recede so that the phenomena of interest—"the things themselves”—can be captured.

In post-WWII social psychology experiments, while researchers’ interest lay in modes of human intersubjectivity, their studies were theatrically designed to circumvent the knowing, sense-making subject to reveal the psychological or physiological mechanisms hidden beneath. Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments, for example, were merely a particularly provocative instantiation of an otherwise widely accepted norm of “deceptive” experimental design in social psychology. In this experimental dramaturgy, the “human subject at the centre”—to whom a world appears as meaningful and actionable (Oliver Sacks 1985)—is actively bracketed out as a reliable interpreter. While some have argued that this mode of experimental social psychology has become obsolete, I suggest that its legacies and strategies—its ways of getting to the things themselves—are bequeathed to and refracted through cognitive neuroscience research on social minds.

Here, I present a dramaturgical analysis of a celebrated experimental scene in cognitive neuroscience research: a monkey study investigating neural mechanisms of human intersubjectivity. I draw out not only how this experiment was staged, but also what sorts of presences and absences it required and the different types of narration and interpretation it afforded.