Human Subjects
Human Subjects
[Ponytail and Megan sit at a desk.] Ponytail: We're concerned that some of your results may be tainted by the fact that your human subjects are awful . Megan: What do you mean?
[Ponytail picks up a sheet of paper.] Ponytail: Several participants in your drug trial were arrested for arson. Megan: Side effects can be unpredictable. Ponytail: They were in the control group.
[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: In your prisoner's dilemma study, 80% of the participants chose to betray their partners before the experimenter had a chance to tell them about the reward. Megan (off-panel): Definitely troubling.
[Ponytail shows Megan another sheet of paper.] Ponytail: In one experiment, your subjects repeatedly gave electric shocks to a stranger in another room. Megan: That's a famous psychological- Ponytail: This was a study of moisturizing creams! Megan: Yes, we're not sure how they snuck in all that equipment.

This strip plays on certain experiments involving human subjects . Ponytail is questioning the reliability of Megan 's experimental results, given that her human subjects appear to be extremely unusual and highly sociopathic .
In the second panel, she mentions that several people in one study had been arrested for arson . Megan begins to suggest that the arson is a side effect of whatever is being tested before she learns that the arsonists are in the control group – that is, the group that is not subjected to whatever is being tested and is used as a comparison to see the differences in the people who are actually being tested. This result is "troubling", as the control group would not be expected to have such a high rate of incidence of arsonists. The implication is that her subjects are not representative of the general population, but appear to have been selected from some aberrant subpopulation, such as a prison or mental institution. Or she could have recruited them through an announcement that catered in some way to arsonists. An alternate explanation comes from comic 790: Control , in which Randall notes his hobby of sneaking into experiments and giving LSD to the control groups. Yet another explanation could be that Ponytail went looking for some clusters of characteristics in the sample population, which had no connection to the study criteria, and happened upon the arson arrests - such clusters are expected if you look at enough different characteristics.
The third panel alludes to the prisoner's dilemma , in which two subjects must independently decide whether to "collaborate" with or "betray" the other subject based on different rewards for each choice (often framed as a different length of prison sentence, or a different amount of money). The rewards tier are selected so that the outcomes for each individual from best to worst are: betraying a collaborator, collaborating with a collaborator, betraying a betrayer, collaborating with a betrayer.
The thought experiment is considered interesting as it's uncertain what the most logical course of action, as choosing betrayal always improves one's situation, yet being in identical situations with no knowledge of each other, it's also logical for both prisoners to make the same choice and both collaborating is better than both betraying. Of course, it would not be expected that normal people would simply betray each other for no reason, without benefiting from it in any way.
The last panel references the Milgram experiment , in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to administer electric shocks to an unseen third party. The unseen third party was part of the experiment and pretended to be in agony. As shocks escalated they would beg for them to stop. The results suggest that people will continue to administer harm, despite the pleading of the victim, simply if told to do so by an authority figure, even when no incentive is provided to the subject to continue. In this case, however, the actual experiment did not involve electric shocks, and thus suggests that the subjects, of their own volition, brought equipment to produce electric shock and simply engaged in the activity unprompted.
In each of these cases, the subjects seem to have some "negative" psychological traits. While it might not be unusual to find one or two people with such traits in a randomly selected group, the fact that all three experiments contain multiple subjects with these traits (and seemingly the same traits in each study) is very unusual, given that most were not studies on psychology, but studies of drugs and moisterizers. Obviously, there would be no need for electric shocks and such in a studies like this [ citation needed ] , and Megan's claim that a side effect of using the investigational drug is arson is unlikely if it wasn't treating psychological issues. Even if it was, arson is a very specific issue that is unlikely to not coexist with other problems.
The title text refers to safety procedures normally required by institutional review boards , which are centralized groups within universities that ensure that experiments are ethical and safe. The implication is that for an IRB to recommend dispensing with safety procedures after meeting the subjects, the subjects must really, really deserve bad treatment. Or that after hanging out with the criminals they are more relaxed on rulebreaking, and adopting their mindset. Or the members of the IRB are, like the human subjects, just sociopathically awful people. Or that Megan is selecting for these subjects, or causing these abnormalities, as a side effect of spending (probably significantly) more effort than is necessary to adhere to the procedures.
The overall theme of experiments that are overwhelmingly skewed by outlier human factors is in itself reminiscent of the recent discovery that many psychological experiments cannot be replicated . That news made quite a bit of noise in the world of science and even made its way in the general press. Just like in the experiments that could not be replicated, it is likely that if the experiments in this comic were attempted again, the outcome would be drastically different than the one achieved here.
[Ponytail and Megan sit at a desk.] Ponytail: We're concerned that some of your results may be tainted by the fact that your human subjects are awful . Megan: What do you mean?
[Ponytail picks up a sheet of paper.] Ponytail: Several participants in your drug trial were arrested for arson. Megan: Side effects can be unpredictable. Ponytail: They were in the control group.
[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: In your prisoner's dilemma study, 80% of the participants chose to betray their partners before the experimenter had a chance to tell them about the reward. Megan (off-panel): Definitely troubling.
[Ponytail shows Megan another sheet of paper.] Ponytail: In one experiment, your subjects repeatedly gave electric shocks to a stranger in another room. Megan: That's a famous psychological- Ponytail: This was a study of moisturizing creams! Megan: Yes, we're not sure how they snuck in all that equipment.
