The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [42]
The essayist Judith Warner has written about the constraints facing mothers in deciding whether to work outside the home: “Why this matters—and why opening this topic up for discussion is important—is very clear: because our public policy continues to rest upon a fictitious idea, eternally recycled in the media, of mothers’ free choices, and not upon the constraints that truly drive their behavior.”39
What Warner says about mothers applies more broadly. We should not comfort ourselves with the belief that we, and everyone around us, are choosing our positions in life. Instead, we should focus on the constraints that bedevil and bewilder all of us.
5
Choice and Power
I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.
—Vito Corleone in The Godfather (Mario Puzo, 1969)
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
—Alex in A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1962)
IF YOU HAPPEN TO LIVE in a college town, you may sometimes see on your favorite café’s bulletin board an advertisement from a scientist asking for volunteers to serve as test subjects for a research project. Some want smokers, others want insomniacs, still others call for any average Joe or Josephine.
Some time ago, one such advertisement in a small city asked for volunteers to help with a university research project about how people learn and remember. Volunteers were paid well for an hour of their time. Let’s imagine you were one of those who agreed to participate.
When you arrive at the research facility, you are paired with another volunteer, whom you have never met before. A middle-aged, distinguished man dressed in a scientist’s white lab coat explains that you and your partner will be participating in a project testing the effect of punishment on learning. He tells you, “One theory is that people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for making a mistake. Actually, though, we know very little about the effect of punishment on learning, because almost no truly scientific studies have been made of it in human beings.”1 This experiment, he explains, is designed to gather evidence about whether punishment affects the learning process in any way, and it calls for one of you to be the “learner” and one the “teacher.” The teacher will be asked to teach the learner a series of word pairs, using punishment to encourage fast learning. You are told you can leave the experiment at any time.
If you’re like me, at this point you’d be a little nervous. I certainly would not want to be the learner. Who wants to be punished for failing to remember some random word sequence?
The scientist says that the fairest way of determining your roles is to draw from a hat. You draw first, and “teacher” is written on your slip of paper. You breathe a sigh of relief. Your glance at your partner, who seems apprehensive but is not backing out.
The scientist then escorts you into the testing area, which has two small rooms. In one room, your partner is strapped into a chair and an electrode is attached to his wrist. The scientist explains that the punishment will come in the form of electric shocks, which might be “extremely painful” but will “cause no permanent damage.” The researcher applies a small amount of paste to the learner’s arm underneath the electrode “to avoid blisters and burns.” He tells you that the electrode is attached to a shock generator in the next room.
You are then taken into the room with the shock generator. About the size of a stereo receiver, it sits on top of a desk next to a clipboard and microphone. On the clipboard is a series of word pairs running down the page. You are to recite the word pairs (“blue box,” “nice day,” “wild duck”) into the microphone, which pipes your voice into the room next door. Then you are to go back through the list again, stating the first word in each pair (“blue”) and offering a multiple choice of words (“sky,