so I’m sitting there in Research Design this morning, learning about, well, designs for, ya know, research, and suddenly I have this flashback.
My cousin Eddie is a few years older than I am, and he has a brother, Chris, who is about 5 years younger than me. One time, we were all on vacation together, and Eddie and I were probably, oh, I don’t know, 9, and 11, and Chris was, like, 4 or 5.
There had been a fight at the dinner table about Chris hating broccoli. He refused to eat it, screaming ensued every time it was on the menu, etc. Well, Eddie and I had heard somewhere that if you hear something in your sleep, it gets into your subconscious, and you learn it. So, natch, we decided that we could CONVINCE his brother Chris into liking broccoli WHILE HE’S SLEEPING. Like, we thought, we can make this kid LOVE broccoli, and then he’ll be all WTF, I can’t WAIT to eat my broccoli with dinner. ACTUALLY CAN I HAVE IT FOR LUCH? I FUCKING LOVE BROCCOLI SO FUCKING MUCH.
We pretended to go to bed on time ALL week, and then as soon as the house was quiet, we’d spend HOURS whispering and snickering into Chris’s ear – You LOOOVE broccoli. You want to MAARRRY broccoli. You can’t WAIT until the next time you eat it. You CRAVE it, you DREAM about it, IT CONSUMES YOU. He’d wake up and be all, Why are you guys leaning over me? And I remember actually convincing him it was a dream! You’re dreaming, Chris, just go back to sleep. Like we’d bother to lean over YOU. Then the next morning he’d be all, I had the CRAZIEST dream…
Well, sure enough, a few days later, someone made broccoli for dinner. I remember sitting there at the table wiggling in my chair trying not to erupt in hysterical laughter, joker grin pasted across my pudgy face. Every time Eddie and I would even make PERIPHERAL eye-contact we’d start giggling like idiots (which wasn’t all that abnormal, honestly), and the whole family tried patiently to ignore us. As the broccoli made it’s agonizingly slow round about the table, we practically came undone with anticipation.
But then, when it came to Chis? He wanted NOTHING to do with it. He immediately started complaining that he hated broccoli and wouldn’t eat it. Simultaneously, Eddie and I BUSRT out in thunderous disappointment: GOD, Christopher, what is WRONG with you! We spent ALL WEEK staying up ALL NIGHT to make you fucking like broccoli and you couldn’t even do it. Can you do ANYTHING right??
Of course, our parents were like, wait, what? You two did WHAT now?
But anyway, I can now see some problems with our design. First off, sample size. It really wasn’t representative of the broccoli-hating population.
Second, there were way too many confounding variables. Were we loud enough? Was a week long enough? Maybe he was just defiant!
And finally, we gave up! Disconfirming evidence does NOT a theory destroy. And yet we were devastated! Failed! Wasted nights, when we could have spent those perfectly good hours hiding our parents cigarette stashes, like we normally did (cruel kids, we were – I can remember many a morning being woken up by one or another of our red-faced parents cursing and demanding to know where we’d cached their cigs, every cabinet open, the contents of every closet strewn about the house… good times).
But really the take home message here is, I’ve ALWAYS been a behavioral scientist.
