I just happened upon a few tweets from a trainee named Toby Zabars asking about the rumors that somebody once put undergraduates into a monkey visuomotor behavior task without instruction and what happened. The foregoing was expurgated from my recent memoir “Eye of the Storm” at the firm insistence of my publisher’s spineless legal counsel. Nevertheless, now that the relevant statutes of limitations have run out, I think I can share it with you.
It was the late 1970s and Bob and I were approaching completion of our PhD theses. | remember it well because the time was marked by great anxiety for me and Bob and our entire cohort. Times were not as easy as they were for our forebears: only 70% of newly minted neuroscience PhDs were getting a position at an R1 university within 3 months of completion of their degree. Bob was one of the unlucky casualties of the new normal. He had to suffer the humiliating indignity of a 1.25 year fellowship at <shudder> NIMH before starting his lab. Of course, to be fair, Bob spent 80% of his time in grad school coked out of his gourd. And look at us now. We persevered and now we are widely considered to be giants of the field! This is why I always discount the whinging tweet storms/TikTok videos from today’s trainees as the embittered murmurings of also rans. But I digress.
So one day, Bob and I got a mimeograph from Kuffler’s assistant informing us of the impending arrival of Phil Zimbardo. I never heard the details, but it seems that Phil was getting some heat at Stanford from the newly empaneled Research Ethics Committee, and he needed a place to lay low for a while. Steve invited him to do a sabbatical and he asked us to show him our work.
At the time, Bob and I were finishing up a series of experiments using our method of motivating starved macaques to perform 20 hour days of, I don’t remember, looking at some wiggly lines or something, by delivering them individual cocaine-laced raisins. By this point in our graduate work, we had a well-oiled machine of undergraduates collecting data for us with unaccounted for cocaine at an all-time low (<25%). We brought Phil downstairs to the basement room where we were running subjects.
“Intriguing,” was all he said before walking out.
Three weeks later, Phil brought us a proposal for a fully formed project. It was horrifying. Seriously, the first draft was insane and probably would have been enough to not only land all three of us in prison, but probably also enough to shut down the entire department. If you think what I am about to describe sounds bad, you should see what we talked him out of.
Within several weeks, we had sketched out a stripped-down version of Phil’s ideas and completed preparations to begin. The plan required many layers of subterfuge, only some of which were Bob and I aware of, both to elude the hand wringing of cowardly deans and ethics obsessed colleagues, and also to prevent word of our plan escaping to the undergraduate population.
“You two are going to be my confederates,” Phil explained to us. “This will require the utmost secrecy. And most importantly, you must do everything I ask. Is that clear?”
Bob and I both nodded.
“Good. Then we will begin tomorrow at 9 AM. I have recruited a number of undergraduate subjects. When you arrive, they will already be in the isolation chambers, prepped for head fixed behavior. You two will be the instructors.”
Apparently inspired by our success with motivating monkeys to infer increasingly cruel and baroque probabilistic structures underlying a visuomotor foraging task, Phil wanted to adapt our approach to explore the limits of human capabilities when properly reinforced.
As promised, when we arrived the next day, the experiments were already in progress. Frankly, I was impressed by the human undergraduates’ performance. With the macaques, it always seemed like Bob and I could not even dream of a task that was sufficiently capricious and convoluted for the monkeys to fail. We used to marvel at the feeble-minded monkeys and their tolerance for our shenanigans, imagining they must have superhuman patience to go through thousands of increasingly frustrating trials for a few more drops of juice or a coke-laced raisin.
After about 10 hours of continuous training, the human subjects had hit a wall. Were we finally reaching the limits of human endurance? Bob and I agreed we had, and proposed popping open one of Steve’s stash of vintage Moet from the cold room, but Phil was far from satisfied.
“Deploy the raisins,” he said, his words measured.
“W-w-hat?” I stammered. “I thought we agreed that was a line we wouldn’t cross!”
He glowered over his glasses at us and tersely repeated, “Deploy. The raisins. The experiment must continue.”
I looked over at Bob, and I could see the terror in his eyes. I can’t explain what came over me in that moment, but Phil seemed so authoritative in his lab coat and so confident and firm in his commands that I felt an irresistible compulsion to comply. This, despite knowing that each of those raisins was loaded up with enough cocaine to cause a small child’s heart to explode.
I began to bargain with myself. I decided that Phil is the boss, so I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. Bob and I are just following orders, right? So we can’t be responsible for what happens, can we? I loaded the raisins into the hoppers and quietly wept in the corner for for what seemed like hours.
Miraculously, the raisins worked! The subjects’ performance skyrocketed from there forward. We had shown that humans, when properly motivated with copious powerful drugs, could equal the performance of a well-trained macaque. We did end up opening one of those bottles of champagne, by the way.
Strangely the next morning, Bob and I arrived to train a new round of subjects as planned, but Phil was nowhere to be found. In fact, the rigs and all the equipment was cleared out of the windowless basement room we had been working out of.
Sometimes, in my quieter moments, I think about those poor undergraduate subjects that were lied to and used by Zimbardo. Those desperate, weak-willed motherfuckers.
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