The absence of fear: Martin Orne's strange experiments
If you’re collecting data from people, how they feel at the time is likely to affect the data you get. This might seem obvious, but it gets overlooked all the time. And so in the 1950s, a psychologist called Martin Orne devoted a strange interlude in his career to making this point to his colleagues.
He was doing it mostly because he was deeply skeptical about popular claims at the time that hypnosis was a really powerful way of getting people to behave differently. Frankly, I think he also did a lot of it because he thought it would be funny, and also because ethnical review boards hadn’t been invented yet.
His basic premise was that people behave differently in psychology studies than they would in real life. One of his demonstrations of this involved sitting a group of students down for an experiment (he told them) in which they had to solve a page of maths puzzles, tear up the page and throw it in the bin, and then get another page of questions and start again. That was it: they just had to keep going until the experiment was done.
"Continue to work," Orne told them. "I will return eventually".
Several hours and no further input later, his students were still plugging away at their pointless task and yet were showing, as Orne put it, "relatively little sign of overt hostility".
It sounds ridiculous because it is: people were doing something meaningless for hours, just because somebody asked them to. Orne's contention was that while people wouldn't normally do something like that, being asked to by a psychologist, as part of an experiment, was an entirely different matter.
In other experiments, he asked people to do bizarre and dangerous things, like sticking their hands in jars of acid or handling venomous snakes. Some of his participants had undergone "hypnosis" beforehand, but his control group hadn't – and crucially, it didn't make much difference. Most people were happy to do as they were told.
Orne argued that people expect different things from psychology studies than they do from real life, which means evaluating behaviour-changing interventions like hypnosis in the lab isn’t useful. His experimental subjects trusted that because of the setting they were in, the acid would be fake and the snake harmless, and acted accordingly.
They were wrong to trust him, actually. Wholly unnecessarily and for reasons best known to himself, Orne used a real venomous snake with a glass screen that would come down if his participants reached for it. The acid was real, too – if participants touched it, they immediately had it washed off.
Put people in a research study and the special context means that they won’t always feel the things they might usually feel: fear, trepadition, or “overt hostility”. Those are all threat responses, justifiable when faced with snakes or infinite maths homework in the wild.
But people signing up for psychology studies of their own free will generally feel safe doing so, so there’s no need for that threat response. A different set of feelings might emerge instead – competitiveness, maybe, or curiosity. Different feelings lead to different behaviours, and different answers.
And potentially a snake bite, I guess, if the glass screen fails.



















