The Joke That Still Haunts Social Science — Minding The Campus
In May 1976, I was a first-year PhD student in communication at Stanford University, supposedly preparing for comprehensive exams. Instead of studying, I spent a Saturday afternoon writing a parody under the. . .
In May 1976, I was a first-year PhD student in communication at Stanford University, supposedly preparing for comprehensive exams. Instead of studying, I spent a Saturday afternoon writing a parody under the pen name “Murdock Pencil. ”The paper, “Salt Passage Research: The State of the Art,” published in theJournal of Communicationin December 1976, purportedly addressed a deceptively simple question: What happens when someone at the dinner table says, “Please pass the salt”?Written in the sober style of academic social science, it reviewed fictional studies, cited real scholars, and concluded, quite seriously, that conclusive evidence regarding the effects of this utterance was “sadly lacking”:Hovland, Lumsdaine and Sheffield … found that when there were other people present at the table, there was a greater likelihood that the utterance, ‘Please pass the salt,’ would result in salt movement toward the source of the utterance. When there were no other people at the table, the utterance, ‘Please pass the salt,’ had no apparent effect. To test the possibility of a time delay … 112 Army recruits, each sitting alone at one end of a table with salt at the other end, to repeat the utterance, “Please pass the salt,” every five minutes for 12 hours. The average distance the salt traveled was . 5 inch, which the experimenters explained was due to measurement error. In other words, asking someone to pass the salt is an ordinary human interaction, but social scientists could spend years operationalizing variables, designing experiments, conducting literature reviews, and publishing papers about it, yet never say anything meaningful about what is actually happening between two people at a dinner table. I slipped photocopies of the unpublished manuscript under faculty office doors. By Monday morning, the department was buzzing. Faculty members were reading, laughing, and asking one another who the author was. Remember: this was 1976, before email or the internet, when manuscripts circulated only if someone photocopied them and passed them along. Somehow, the Xeroxed “Murdock Pencil” version reached the editor of theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, who published a note asking whether anyone knew the identity of its elusive author so that he could invite him to submit the piece. I never saw the note at the time. By then, however, Stanford faculty had encouraged me to submit the article to theJournal of Communication, where it was quickly accepted and published in December 1976 under my own name. Shortly afterward, to my astonishment, the article escaped academia’s silos when it was reprinted in theWashington Post. For something dashed off in a few hours to avoid exam preparation, it has had a remarkably long life. It remains the most widely read thing I have ever written. Even then, I understood that the piece was more than a joke. It was a small protest against a way of studying human behavior that often seemed to miss what mattered most. Many years later, while having dinner in Scotland, I mentioned the article to a business colleague. He nearly choked on his food. He knew the piece well, he said, though only under the pseudonym “Murdock Pencil. ” Then he told me that he had once handed it to a young woman trying to decide between graduate study in social psychology and counseling. “If you choose social psychology,” he told her, “this is what you’ll be reading and writing for the rest of your life. ”She chose counseling. 50 years after writing “Salt Passage Research,” I think I understand why it resonated. As an undergraduate English major, I had been trained to see human beings as complex, morally responsible persons with histories, intentions, and purposes. Much of the research I encountered in graduate school was methodologically rigorous, yet it often captured behavior while losing sight of meaning. Something essential was lost in the translation from personal experience to statistical significance. My parody worked because it imitated the conventions of academic research closely enough to be plausible. It had a literature review, hypotheses, operational definitions, experimental conditions, and carefully hedged conclusions. In form, it looked exactly like serious scholarship. That was the point. The essay raised an unsettling question: How much of what we regard as insight is simply a function of method and presentation?The problem is not limited to any one’s discipline or political tendency. Every intellectual community faces the temptation to mistake complexity for wisdom, technical sophistication for understanding, and fashionable assumptions for truth. To be clear, this is not an argument against social science. The systematic study of human behavior has generated many valuable insights. But method, however rigorous, is not the same as meaning. The deepest realities of human life—love, ambition, resentment, loyalty, vocation, sacrifice, faith—do not yield easily to experimental design. They require forms of inquiry attentive to context, moral significance, and the irreducible mystery of the person. “Salt Passage Research” did not resolve these tensions. It merely made them visible. What began as a graduate-school joke now strikes me as a modest reminder that our most sophisticated institutions are always susceptible to a simple human failing: confusing the appearance of knowledge with the pursuit of wisdom. That was worth laughing about in 1976. It is worth remembering today whether anyone passes the salt. Donate TodayWill you help us continue our work to reform American higher education?