Experiments of the Mind: From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter

by Emily Martin

An inside view of the experimental practices of cognitive psychology―and their influence on the addictive nature of social media

Experimental cognitive psychology research is a hidden force in our online lives. We engage with it, often unknowingly, whenever we download a health app, complete a Facebook quiz, or rate our latest purchase. How did experimental psychology come to play an outsized role in these developments? Experiments of the Mind considers this question through a look at cognitive psychology laboratories. Emily Martin traces how psychological research methods evolved, escaped the boundaries of the discipline, and infiltrated social media and our digital universe.

Martin recounts her participation in psychology labs, and she conveys their activities through the voices of principal investigators, graduate students, and subjects. Despite claims of experimental psychology’s focus on isolated individuals, Martin finds that the history of the field―from early German labs to Gestalt psychology―has led to research methods that are, in fact, highly social. She shows how these methods are deployed amplified by troves of data and powerful machine learning, an unprecedented model of human psychology is now widespread―one in which statistical measures are paired with algorithms to predict and influence users’ behavior.

Experiments of the Mind examines how psychology research has shaped us to be perfectly suited for our networked age.

Genres: Psychology, Science

312 pages, Hardcover

Published January 25, 2022

Reviews

[Brandy Cross · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is excruciatingly boring and that's coming from a person currently reading dinosaur systematics, which for the record is mostly a litany of bone measurements. It's also not well put together. The history and ending sections don't match the style of the rest of the book, the takeaways are all over the place, the format of the book haphazardly changes. It's well researched but prepare some patience if you go for it

[Joe Bathelt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book describes the research of an anthropologist who did fieldwork in experimental psychology research groups. As someone who works in a Psychology department and does research on cognition, I was intrigued by this premise. However, I mostly found the book disappointing. The description of the research practices felt incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Perhaps, I did not get the purpose of the anthropological investigation. This felt vague and incomplete to me. For instance, the criticisms felt very specific to the particular research that the author observed. Other aspects felt so obvious that I'm not sure how they are informative. For instance, there is a whole section about the use of tables, as in furniture. Apparently, they are used to fix participants in time and space. Another topic that got me interested in the book was that it was supposed to highlight how practices from experimental psychology have made their way into Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. However, I found the chapter in the book dedicated to this topic very disappointing. In contrast to the investigation of experimental psychology laboratories, this chapter is not based on an in-person investigation. Instead, it is a summary of other writing about the topic. The chapter felt like an afterthought and offered very little insight beyond topics that have been discussed elsewhere before. In sum, I would not recommend the book. Perhaps, the book is lost on me because I'm not in the target audience. I can only assume that it is aimed at people who are primarily interested in anthropology. As someone who has no clue about anthropology, I'm mostly left puzzled.

[Rebecca Fung · Rating 1 out of 5]

The lesson I learned from this book: Get the tagline and the blurb of your book right. A quick read of this tagline and blurb made us pick up this book because we thought we'd be reading about psychology in relation to social media. Imagine my confusion, disappointment and annoyance that I slogged through this book and found the social media stuff was no more than some very trite bits at the end of the book - hardly insightful or substantial. I get the real sense that Martin wrote this book with pretty much nothing to do with social media and there was a need to "jazz it up a little" so she or she was advised to add a bit about social media to it and then it was marketed with this being its main content. All it does then is attract the wrong audience and disappoint.

That aside (if it can be put aside), this is really hard to read otherwise. It seems more to do with anthropology than psychology for a lot of the content (again, another point where the marketing may be aimed at the wrong readers).

The book is mainly about the experimental process and while this isn't a bad topic, at times it seems pretty dry and descriptive and I'm not sure the points or insights Martin is making, or they are a little too obvious and don't add too much to provoke thought.

I found the writing style a bit of a slog with the long descriptions of research possibly obfuscating the points the author wanted to explore.