CRASSH

Psychological experimentation has a complex and somewhat problematic history. Much critical effort has been expended on detailing the empirical, ontological and political difficulties which are produced in the assumption that social life can be ‘staged’ within the laboratory. In this paper I want to engage with psychological experimentation in a different mode through inscribing it within two very different traditions: theatre and art. Using examples of (comparatively) recent studies such as Hamlin et al’s (2007) experimental demonstration of the innate sociality of babies and Loftus et al’s (1994) ‘Lost in the mall’ paradigm for discounting false memories, I will argue that the direct reproduction of a social phenomenon is never the ambition of this type of work. Rather it aims at the public production and mobilisation of ‘essences’ which could never be experienced as such. The type of abstraction which underpins this procedure is aesthetic rather than scientific in character. Moreover, psychological experiments themselves function as moral fables rather than direct reflections of some external social referent. Their primary purpose is pedagogic . Treated in this way psychological experimentation ought no longer to be condemned as reductive or bad science, but rather evaluated instead using aesthetic and performative criteria.