The Mystery of the Vanished Citations
James McConnell’s Forgotten 1960s Quest for Planarian Learning,
a Biochemical Engram, & Celebrity
by Mark Rilling
The Missing 1960s Decade
Memory transfer: McConnell’s Blind Alley
McConnell’s Struggle With Critics Over Invertebrate Learning
Controlling for Experimenter Bias
Controlling for Pseudoconditioning & Sensitization
McConnell’s Origin Myth for Planarian Learning
Escaping peer review as a celebrity-scientist
The Worm Runner’s Digest: Peer Review Versus the 1960s Counterculture
Attracting the Unabomber. While overselling behavior modification
The Assassination Attempt
Overpopularizing Behavior Modification
Conclusion: Some Historical Lessons for Today from the 1960s
References
Even after he was well established as a comparative psychologist at the University of Michigan, McConnell was sometimes unable to obtain respect for his work on planarian learning from scientists in other disciplines. Libbie Hyman,
Libbie Henrietta Hyman was an American zoologist.
a zoologist, was the world’s leading expert on invertebrates. After establishing that invertebrates could learn, McConnell moved on to the problem of memory. McConnell, Jacobson, and Kimble (1959) demonstrated that planaria could retain an association established by Pavlovian conditioning for four weeks. During the early 1960s, when McConnell visited Hyman at her office in the American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City.
in New York City,
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 300.46 square miles, New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States.
Hyman dismissed McConnell’s article on retention with the following words,
I’m very sorry, but I just can’t believe that. No that just can’t be. I could believe that a planarian might remember something for five minutes or so. But weeks or months? No that just can’t be
Clearly, the expertise of comparative psychologists in behavior analysis had not yet earned the full respect ofscientists in other disciplines during the 1960s. Some simply did not believe the data.
McConnell’s Origin Myth for Planarian Learning
McConnell was a charter member of the Science Fiction Writers of America,
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, doing business as Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, commonly known as SFWA is a nonprofit organization of professional science fiction and fantasy writers.
and his stories were good enough to appear in magazines for science fiction. In his story, Learning Theory, (McConnell, 1965), McConnell is the protagonist who is abducted during the preparation of a lecture on learning theory onto an interstellar labship to become a subject, confined to a series of chambers that resemble the Skinner box, T-maze,
In behavioral science, a T-maze (or the variant Y-maze) is a simple forked passage used in animal cognition experiments.
and Lashley jumping stand. After first behaving according to the predictions of learning theory, McConnell realizes that he will be returned to Ann Arbor if he misbehaves by violating the predictions of his captors’ theory of learning. McConnell was an iconoclast, and his story is a spoof on learning theory in 1960.
After the loss of grant support produced the demise of the planarian research project around 1971, McConnell wrote a very innovative textbook of introductory psychology (McConnell, 1974a). Given his background in science fiction, it was natural for McConnell to blend fiction with the factual material of a textbook. To capture student interest, a unique feature of McConnell’s text was a short story wrapped around the psychological meat of each chapter (McConnell, 1978). The fictional stories were deliberately written to avoid gender and ethnic bias in language (McConnell, 1973).
For his chapter on memory, McConnell (1983) wrote a fictional version of the Thompson and McConnell (1955) study called Where Is Yesterday? The heroes ofthe story were students who were running an experiment on planarian learning. The antagonist was an establishment teacher of the students called Sauerman. These characters were obviously inspired by Thompson and McConnell’s experience with Bitterman. Notwithstanding McConnell’s quotation at the beginning of this article, he rewrote history by cutting Bitterman out of the origins of planarian learning while incorporating into the fictional account the very control Bitterman had required for his account the very control Bitterman had required for his endorsement.
The Science of Humor Is No Laughing Matter
by Alexandra Michel
One team of coders (naïve to the study hypotheses) identified all of the instances of laughter in the video, and a second team of coders (also blind to the study hypotheses) watched the video and rated how submissive or dominant each laugh sounded using a scale of −3 (definitely submissive) to 3 (definitely dominant). Laughs receiving average ratings of 2 or higher were classified as dominant, whereas laughs receiving average ratings of −2 or lower were classified as submissive.
A third team of coders, also blind to the hypotheses, coded the audio of each laugh on specific sound characteristics — loudness, pitch, pitch range, pitch modulation, airiness, and burst speed — that are associated with disinhibited behavior.
If dominant laughs are more disinhibited than submissive laughs, as we hypothesize, they should exhibit greater vocal intensity, more pitch range and modulation, and greater burst speed, Oveis and colleagues explain.
Previous research published in Psychological Science demonstrated that holding a position of power can influence the acoustic cues of our speech. The voices of individuals primed with high-power roles tended to increase in pitch and were, at the same time, more monotone. Listeners who had no knowledge of the experiment were able to pick up on vocal cues signaling status: They correctly rated individuals in the high-power group as being more powerful with a surprising degree of accuracy — about 72% of the time.
Findings from the fraternity-brother experiment also showed that low-status individuals were more likely to change their laughter based on their position of power; that is, the pledges produced more dominant laughs when they were in the powerful role of teasers. High-status individuals, on the other hand, maintained a consistent pattern of dominant laughter throughout the teasing game regardless of whether they were doing the teasing or being teased themselves.
In another study, the research team tested out whether naïve observers could detect an individual’s social status based just on their laughter, and whether the type of laugh (dominant or submissive) could influence judgements of social status.
A group of 51 college students was randomly assigned to listen to a set of 20 of the laughs recorded from the fraternity brothers. Each participant listened to an equal number of dominant and submissive laughs from both high- and low-status individuals. Participants then estimated the social status of the laugher using a series of 9-point ratings scales. And indeed, laughers producing dominant laughs were perceived to be significantly higher in status than laughers producing submissive laughs.
If dominant laughs are more disinhibited than submissive laughs, as we hypothesize, they should exhiThis was particularly true for low-status individuals, who were rated as significantly higher in status when displaying a dominant versus submissive laugh, Oveis and colleagues note. Thus, by strategically displaying more dominant laughter when the context allows, low-status individuals may achieve higher status in the eyes of others.
It’s unclear whether this was because high-status laughs include characteristics that were not measured in the current study or whether high-status fraternity brothers just didn’t have very convincing low-status laughs while being teased.
Too Soon?
