The start of the essay is the most interesting part of this image.

So whilst I was studying for a masters in psychology, we had this group research project.

It was investigating a few traits of the college boys and determining which of these traits predicted sexual and relationship information. Such as number of sexual partners and if they were in a committed relationship.

One of the traits was humor.

So the way we were instructed by the lead research professor to rate this ability, was to have the guys complete a questionnaire.

Some of the questions were about how important comedy and humor was to them. How often they watched or listened to funny shows/comedians.

But the last question was a short answer. They were presented with an image and were asked to write a story about the image.

The image was this famous photograph.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79933 It’s two people with their head covered with cloth, embracing and kissing.

Now I don’t know who validated this questionnaire. But there was objective guidelines on rating the responses.

Such as how original it was. And how much humor it had. And if it was dark or light hearted.

And this one guy.

He wrote like this two or 3 page story. (Most people wrote a half page).

I can’t tell you the exact contents because it was so absurd and ridiculous and 8 years ago. But I personally remember thinking it was rather hilarious because he wrote so much detail and gave all this supposition about why they wore the face coverings. I think they were shy aliens or something.

And then all this back story.

But the professor reviewed it and even brought it up in a meeting. Where he read a large chunk of it and then I thought he was going to go over how to rate it per the guidelines but instead said this was the kind of thing we had to remove from the study because obviously the guy was being cheeky. (This was in Britain).

I think 2 or 3 of us in the group chuckled at the story.but most didn’t think it was amusing.

Anyway. This post reminds me of this.

And also. Fyi. If you participate in a psych study, it’s very possible your results will get shared with all the grad students working on it and some of their grad friends not working on it.

Your name won’t be shared. We have very strict rules about that. And people seem to respect those rules. But if you give weird interesting data. You can bet it’s getting passed around and shared a few times.

The professor told us “there are a lot of crazy people out there just trying to ruin your data sets for kicks”.

I don’t think this particular student was doing that. I think he just has a strong sense of humor which was not understood by most.