Yet another scientific milestone is revealed as fake! This one in psychology! Boy I am shocked, I tell you. It’s one of the most famous experiments in group dynamics.

Born in the summer of 1905 and raised in İzmir province, Turkey, during the dying days of the Ottoman empire, Sherif won a place at Harvard to study psychology. But he found himself frustrated by the narrowness of the discipline, which mainly involved tedious observation of lab rats. He was drawn instead to the emerging field of social psychology, which looks at the way human behaviour is influenced by others. In particular, he became obsessed by group dynamics: how individuals band together to form cohesive units and how these units can find themselves at each other’s throats.

If you haven’t read about it before, here’s what goes happened:

Sherif’s cover story was that he was running a summer camp in Middle Grove. His plan was to bring a group of boys together, allow them to make friends, then separate them into two factions to compete for a prize. At this point, he believed, they would forget their friendships and start demonising one another. The pièce de résistance was to come at the end: Sherif planned to set a forest fire in the vicinity of the camp. Facing a shared threat, they would be forced to work as one team again.

At this point, I’m going to have to go through everything I thought I knew about psychology, figure out what was based in sound experimentation or has been adequately reproduced, and strip my understanding down to its bare bones. It’s disconcerting how much of what we think we know is based on complete lies and/or wishful thinking.

Here are some things that I do know that are reflected in the article:

Why it’s important to listen to Alex Jones

By the time of the incident with the suitcases and the ukulele, the boys had worked out that they were being manipulated. Instead of turning on each other, they helped put the tent back up and eyed their “camp counsellors” with suspicion. “Maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be,” one of them said.

The kids saw through the “false flags” set for them by the experimenters, and eventually turned on the camp staff. Sounds a lot like what’s going on with our dear overlords and all of the possible false flags surrounding gun control. Whether or not you like AJ, his eyes are open to the shenanigans that the elite like to pull over on us plebs and its good to be reminded of that.

Fun fact: the Rockefeller Foundation established the first two schools of public health in the US, at Johns Hopkins and Harvard.

Remove money from research and add risk

But the Rockefeller Foundation had given Sherif $38,000. In his mind, perhaps, if he came back empty-handed, he would face not just their anger but the ruin of his reputation. So, within a year, he had recruited boys for a second camp, this time in Robbers Cave state park in Oklahoma. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of Middle Grove.

And of course, the second experiment went exactly according to plan.

The PI was ashamed to return to his granting institute without the results he had promised in the grant. The current funding structure of “science” basically incentivizes making up results before all the data is in, thus providing tremendous incentive to bias the data either consciously or unconsciously. It’s true, most grant-funded scientist have a racket going where they use their previous grant money to start research for the project that will win the next grant, because the granting agencies rarely award for grants that aren’t already viable.

There is all sorts of incentive to game the metrics and indicators in the scientific community, and very little incentive to produce true, verifiable results.

I’m sure there’s somebody doing rigorous, honest science out there. Somewhere.

Psychology is practiced by broken people

The robustness of the boy’s “civilised” values came as a blow to Sherif, making him angry enough to want to punch one of his young academic helpers.

There’s a truism that psychologists, as a whole, tend to have more mental problems than their patients. The people who self-select for psychology are looking to explain and/or treat their own issues. That opens the door to a buttload of wrong thinking, like what Vox Day is currently addressing with Jordan B Peterson’s stuff–broken people constructing working theories of the world around themselves, and then inflicting it on others.

This is also why I’m extremely wary of therapy, even though I think that talking some things through might be helpful for myself and for my gut monster. As a Christian, as a right-facing Trump supporter, I trigger all sorts of alarms in the type of person that is a therapist, and perhaps I am jumping to conclusions but I really doubt that I would get an objective standard of care if I actually revealed any of my honest innermost thoughts. I don’t want a new set of blind spots shiv’d under my fingernails while I’m trying to talk about my old blind spots.