Self-Experimentation: A Call For Change from Behaviorism, Vol. 9(1), Spring 1981. Allen Neuringer.
13 thoughts on “Week 2: Self-Experimentation: A Call For Change from Behaviorism”
I found this article to be incredibly problematic.
The author claims that “if experimental psychologists applied the scientific method to their lives they would learn more of importance to everyone”.
The assumption here is that a scientific method can be applied to one’s own life, that the people you interact with on a day to day basis – families, friends – would be able/willing to participate without bias if they knew of the experiment, and most fundamentally at all – that it’s possible to design an experiment to be administered to oneself then carry it out without subconsciously designing out undesirable possibilities, and/or living in a way where behavior is totally as it would be in the absence of the experiment. If any of these thing could even possibly be true, then the idea that the experiment is valid seems to fail. This is quite aside from the statistical sticking point that a sample of one is not a sample. The author mentions these issues, but doesn’t really deal with them in any way that would put self experimentation on a par with properly run scientific trials.
However, leaving aside the content of the article which is focused on self-experimentation in psychology (a difficult subject to test experimentally at the best of times) it may be useful to think about self experimentation in the context we live in now. As a group, it may be possible to agree on a testable hypothesis – but then to operate as individuals in the gathering of data to test the hypothesis. We could passively surveil ourselves, and have raw data fed from us along with the distributed group of “individual” participants; the data could be collected centrally and analyzed using a common method – before being given back to people as a set of insights/data.
Self experimentation in this context may be useful there’s a valid way for each “node” to be calibrated to an accurate baseline, and where environmental factors can be controlled for – or measured so closely that they can be subtracted with near-perfect accuracy.
Excuse me while I troll for a minute.
I did a pretty rough self-tracking experiment while reading this. The first 50% of the article I read at home, in the morning, while standing and I found it interesting and easy to get. I did the final 50% sitting at ITP at around 4:30PM and found it grueling (minus the final 3-4% where is becomes prophetic).
There is one thing painfully obvious about the middle portion of this article that was, in a way, pointed out about in the reading of A Billion Little Experiments where it’s emphasized that “putting ‘tracking’ above ‘easing of life’ is misguided and ineffective.” Putting ‘lots of words’ above ‘just doing it’ is misguided and put me to sleep.
Ok then. Moving along.
What I did find interesting was the idea that you can conduct an experiment on yourself and strive to disprove your initial hypothesis to curb a tendency towards bias. Also, I would agree where he says that there may be greater value in “the utilization of knowledge” rather than just more knowledge. That sums up what ITP is pretty well. What we do with existing technology and the meaning we give it is just as, if not more, important than new technologies. Likewise, utilizing existing healthcare techniques and knowledge through a behavior change will make a greater positive effect than inventing or discovering new techniques.
Try some stuff out. See what you learn. Apply what you can and hopefully it improves your life.
This reading indirect demonstrate the assumption of scientific methods can be applied to people’s life. However, as the writer mentioned that it is not easy to demonstrated that assumption is possible because self-experimentation has less control over their environmental and hereditary variables. In the reading, many examples of ‘A-B-A’ experiments imply that not quite accurate results they can get from as much as from animal experiment, but it is very important to understand that self-experiment is about all goals, bringing them into one’s life on a more personal level for greater self understanding. According to the progress of self-experiment, there will be time-consuming, analysis of our own behaviors,tension-producing, often disappointing for us to keep doing individual experiments. It must a proper, safe, and explicit methods to control the environmental outcomes. Here, I believe there will be a monitoring tool to do all the process for them. The point of this self-experiment is necessary to compare statements from the past to present that help experts to assist people’s affluent life. This article emphasizing a sharing data.
From the beginning my question of the actual effects scientific experimental method can be applied to human’s life, some criticisms in the reading help me to think over alternative way of self-experiment usages.
Account for experiments for human life, this article critics that it is not sufficient to understand people’s unconstrained behaviors in a natural environment, under highly controlled circumstances. This is because, according to more aspects of psychologist, people is freely unorganized and self-oriented, naturally.
However, we utilize others’ self-experiment results. As the self-experimenters will mostly concern of issues directly relevant to their own lives, they will affect other experimenters to study similar issues.
How we start with self-experiment? From the science, people can utilize to understand human behaviors? This article clearly suggests that best testable hypotheses will accurately guide us to avoid the pseudo-explanatory of randomly chosen expertise.
Furthermore, nowadays, we are exposed too much to the online environment. Sometimes, we loose our sights and we are interrupted from uncertain online resource. This self-experimentation will help us to do more self-control, as well.
For a self-experiment better, one increases variability in one’s life. Genetically diverse population is most successful at exploiting its environment. How we can keep our life diverse? It is already shown in advance this article, sharing data and keep the track with others. This is simple solution and now we need a tool for doing this. Tool must be simple and readily. Just not only from self-recordable note, but also digitizing input data from collecting self-monitoring, these both are useful to stimulate and increase variability in self-oriented life.
Life is rotating between people and people. we are supporting stimuli each others. Self-experiment is about significant interaction with others. Alike science progress, it has a progress: generation, check the results, and providing missing components. we need to invent somehow reliable, variable, and feasible device to assist human’s behavior, and problems in life.
I actually found the overall message of this article as useful—If a trained behavioral psychologists applied the scientific method to their own lives would that bring more insight to their studies of others? How does one use self-experiment to develop new discoveries? — This paper pushed me to ask a personal question: As a designer, can I a gain more insight from studying the behavior of someone else or from analyzing my self-behavior?
I have worked as an interaction designer for the last 3 years. I consistently have done my best work by putting myself in the shoes of the other person (the user). I work to understand how they might interpret the product, the website, or the interface in general; then I draw on those understandings to lead my designs. I have often found myself designing for things I know nothing about; which always is coupled by weeks of research. It this case, putting my self the shoes of the user has helped me greatly.
On the other side of the coin, I realized that I have come up with my best innovations and discoveries by designing something that has come from myself; something that I was passionate about and knew well. Those solid discoveries and insights have all been driven by self-understanding. My advisor at PARC always said you are best when you design something you know.
I thought about this context of this class. The importance of self tracking and self-experiment; how understanding our own selves better gives a power to relate to the world in a more useful way. I am interested to keep this message in for front of my design efforts; and see where it takes me and other people in the class in using self to discover useful tools for the world!
Neuringer admits that self-experimentation is wrought with inherent issues that can confound results and put into question any sort of conclusion. BUT, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, and it doesn’t mean we can’t all benefit from it. He claims the self-behavior analysis field is lagging (at least in 1981). Through structured exploratory personal analysis we can step outside our often robotic monotonous habitual daily lives and achieve worthwhile perspectives as well as compelling results that can be interpreted, shared, re-implemented, re-interpreted, and so on. The emphasis is not on any final product, but rather the integration of a “scientific” self-analysis process as a means of continually evolving on an individual micro- like scale. And if we all engage and share in these processes together, the effect has unlimited potential.
This emphasis on the group and sharing of results is something I really hadn’t associated with self-tracking. For the most part, I considered self-experimentation a very inwardly focused and, admittedly, selfish endeavor. Reframing it in the context of the larger group gives with the possibilities of positively influencing and being influenced by others makes the whole endeavor much more meaningful and exciting. I’m curious to see how, as a group, our class can benefit from the support and feedback we get from each other as we progress through our own individual processes.
As a follow-up to Fred’s aside, I read the whole article siting down at my desk in my apartment. I definitely flew through the first half of the piece, which I’d describe as much more account based, and I crawled through the second half, which I would describe as much more analytical. My thoughts – good, clear story-telling makes for easier communication, better comprehension, and more enjoyable reading.
I found, like many others in the class that the first half of this reading was easy to get through, the second half much harder. (To be fair, I was also lying down. Maybe if I had been moving around I might have absorbed more.) It started to drag out towards the end though when he began listing his points. I remember liking behaviorism when I first learned about it. The idea that we can boil the very intangible essence of ourselves into a simple explanation fascinated me.
However, I find it hard to compare self-experimentation with other experiments like a double-blind experiment. I just consider self-experimentation to be closer to case-studies, studies where one can draw a very loose conclusion that adds to a larger picture, but not one to be applied to a population. But, I do think in large large numbers, the data would begin to show reliable trends that would benefit the everyone.
The reading also made me think on just how there is a lack of a standard in self-experimentation because it’s usually inherently biased to the experimenter who also happens to be the subject. Just knowing you are partaking in an experiment can leave a significant change in your results.
So it seems there still a gap today between studies conducted in a lab and one conducted at home, but like the author was saying, perhaps the two can supplement and lend more meaning to each other.
I enjoyed reading about all the examples of self-experimentation that have been documented in journals, anecdotes of those performed by the author’s students, and the detailed self-experiments performed by the author on himself. The author then tries to address some of the objections to self-experimentation and lists many criticisms of experimental analysis, ending with the suggestion that self-experimentation is the next step in the evolution of the field.
I thought that the section where he describes several “consequences” of self-experimentation made a lot of interesting points. In particular, his discussion of “directed variability” as a pre-requisite to the occurrence of learning was an interesting way to explain how self-experimentation is helpful to an individual – by changing up our into our daily routines and habits in a structured way, we make a conscious effort to learn more about ourselves and come up with our own solutions to our own problems.
Expanding from the individual learnings that result from self-experimentation, there seem to be two ways that others can benefit from your results, should you decide to share them. One is they can be inspired by your story and motivated to try your experiment on themselves. Our guest speaker last week was a great example of this – he didn’t need any slides to tell his story because his results spoke for themselves (although a detailed schedule or record of exactly what he did to achieve his results would have been helpful). And the other is that the data from your experiments can be aggregated with others who performed similar experiments, from which more generalized theories and knowledge can be derived with the help of statistical analysis.
Can we can make the author’s imagined world – where self-experimentation, as an activity that improves individual lives while advancing scientific progress, becomes as common as watching TV – a reality?
neuringer heftily argues in favor of the scientific integrity and insight offered by experimental self-experimentation. his initial presentation of notable self-experimentations range from the amusing to grotesque, and are certainly exciting. but, most importantly he demonstrates two things: 1) the affect of self-tracking and recording as a catalyst for mindfulness for the researcher/subject and 2) the difficulty of quantifying and rating emotional/perceptional factors in self-experimental studies. it’s evident that self-experimentation can reveal patterns in individual behavior to improve the quality of life and performance for its practitioner. however, the research is commonly held to be subjective and unique by the scientific community.
neuringer counters that self-experimentation reveals patterns that extend to a wider audience. he argues that controlled regulated research environments don’t account for the randomness and variation of real-life. i find this argument a bit weak — individual subjective testing will never compare to the empirical validity of testing a hypothesis against large sets of variation. and that’s where i think neuringer misses the most powerful potential of self-experimentation — the aggregation of individual data into large powerful sets of data. data that can find patterns not only for the individual, but for groups of people — to gain insight about themselves from themselves, and each other. the potential of self-experimentation lies in the collection of these individual sets of data; the opening, sharing, and aggregation of data from individual-to-individual.
I had a strong suspicion that I was not going to support this scientific article when it ended the opening paragraph talking about “alcohol, orgasm, or acid.” Sure enough, like the other comments I see listed, I found the article a bit underwhelming.
I am immediately struck by how interesting it is that most quantified selfers seem to be average people and not scientists. Their goals are purely selfish and thus avoid one of the main issues presented in this article, that this movement needs to be incorporated into modern mainstream science. While the author does present a fascinating scientific history of self-experimentation, he seems to overestimate the potential for this line of work to gain acceptance within the professional scientific community.
As others have noted, he certainly does offer an accurate prediction of “self-experimental health groups, self-experimental child-rearing groups, self-experimental runners, self-experimental artists, and self-experiemental citizens for social change.”
Nonetheless, to defend an “unplanned A-B-A design, with number of ideas the dependent variable and the recording or absence of recording of daily activities as the independent variable,” is difficult regardless of whether your audience is fellow scientists or ITP students. Any scientific argument built on this foundation is sure to fail.
While the author did effectively predict some parts of the modern quantified self movement, he nonetheless seems to have underestimated the power of modern day sensors to automate the process and provide an objective data set. In this regard, his measurement of “interesting ideas” based on a “magnitude estimate the ‘novelty, goodness, or interest’ of each of the ideas generated.’” seems unnecessarily flawed. I think most quantified selfers would agree that such subjective distinctions are no basis for a self-experimentation.
It’s being 30 years since this article was published. 30 years in which science and technology had advanced significantly. But even in the 80′s talking about self-experimentation, I don’t think was a novel thing. I realized that I’ve done self-experimentation in many ways, many times. It is a natural human behavior, trying to understand how is it that our body works and responds to certain stimulus. At some point, everybody has experience how is to measure something about themselves and get into conclusions that might be or don’t be right.
What I like about the reading was the fact that is written. I mean, it made me think about all the times that I’d been wanted to understand behaviors and I started thinking about tracking things but they go out of my mind. I’ve never written everything about my little experiments. I think is very sassy to say that I found something about me that is correlated to another behavior. Scientists spend many years to prove their hypothesis, and I believe that the discipline to collect the data to be analyzed is a rigorous process that should taken into account to do self-experimenting.
Usually when I think about myself and the way I track my behaviors, I select the variable by my own taste and I do think that there should be a better way to compare those variables.
This makes me think about Nicholas Felton. He tracks every aspect of his life. He keeps doing it as a routine and after collecting the data, he sits and analyzed it, so when people reads his reports they can make correlations about his behaviors, but he doesn’t makes those decisions.
Anyway, this article opens my mind to think a lot of things related to my own health and the way we measure our own lives.
It was indeed interesting to read all this stories about self-experimentation and at the same time, it was showing how to develop self-experimentation further with objections of this.
It is tricky to make a platform for public in that it supposed to change individual’s behavior with their data. That means, this type self-experimentation platform should not only be universal but also be flexible enough to apply to many different type of circumstances.
Like the author mentioned in the objection part, the key point is up to how we can control the whole environment of this experimentation. Sometimes, it is not easy to recognize what is dependent variable, and what is independent variable. It is vague to see the relationship between two factors for every element are deeply related to each other. So we can’t see less food is first,or less sleep is first. Also life is not completely divided by day. Yesterday’s physical condition could affect on today’s condition.
If there are tons of less controlled environmental and hereditary facts in self-experimentation world, does the quantity of accumulated data affect to quality of result?
If so, how we can motivate people to record everyday life?
There is credence to the fact that self-experimentation can lead valuable information about the field that you find yourself in, esp one that relies on always analyzing others. It’s interesting that behavioural psychologists at the end of the day, turn out to be as fallible as anyone else, given that their work aims to bring into awareness and thus facilitate behaviour change.
Actors are all about self-experimentation. For many, the instinct to observe, not just others but also themselves leads to many a fascinating discovery about human nature. My acting teacher was well known for his LSD ‘trips’. Many actors who used claimed that it made them better actors.
The issues that he brings up with regard to why self experimentation is complicated seem to be losing ground in this age. Time and social norms may still hold true and self quantification might still have a way to go before it moves from early adopters to the mainstream, but the idea of tracking yourself and sharing it has already made headway with platforms like Foursqaure and status updates that urge you to think about and share how you ‘feel’.
My only question is whether the insights gleaned through self-experimentation are always for the better or if it could take us towards increased paranoia and competition. Like everything, moderation is the predictable answer here, but we humans are rarely interested in the grey. 23 & Me can be a great guide and aid or it can be a cause of fear and constant anxiety. I wonder if in the future, self measurement statistics will become a normal component of a Match.com profile, a health insurance prerequisite and a job determinant.
I appreciate reading about self-experimentation’s tradition of tracking the weird or off-colour: from excrement to LSD and everything in between. The many examples Neuringer give of eccentric inquiry give us as budding self-experimenters license to track something perhaps not so obviously practical and well covered that might lead to an important discovery. Also, I think Fogg’s examination of Persuasive Design could have used some more examples of sparks, facilitators and signals. That aside, I knew this paper would trigger (ha) a reaction that self experimentation is some sort of pseudoscience(and isn’t science a cultural construction also). But I think its important to remember self experimentation is purporting to be hard science performed in a clinical setting. Empiricism, especially today, is a valuable way for removing barriers to experimentation present at the many universities where the line between corporate funding and academia create a tension in interest (this was an ever-present debate at my undergrad).
I found this article to be incredibly problematic.
The author claims that “if experimental psychologists applied the scientific method to their lives they would learn more of importance to everyone”.
The assumption here is that a scientific method can be applied to one’s own life, that the people you interact with on a day to day basis – families, friends – would be able/willing to participate without bias if they knew of the experiment, and most fundamentally at all – that it’s possible to design an experiment to be administered to oneself then carry it out without subconsciously designing out undesirable possibilities, and/or living in a way where behavior is totally as it would be in the absence of the experiment. If any of these thing could even possibly be true, then the idea that the experiment is valid seems to fail. This is quite aside from the statistical sticking point that a sample of one is not a sample. The author mentions these issues, but doesn’t really deal with them in any way that would put self experimentation on a par with properly run scientific trials.
However, leaving aside the content of the article which is focused on self-experimentation in psychology (a difficult subject to test experimentally at the best of times) it may be useful to think about self experimentation in the context we live in now. As a group, it may be possible to agree on a testable hypothesis – but then to operate as individuals in the gathering of data to test the hypothesis. We could passively surveil ourselves, and have raw data fed from us along with the distributed group of “individual” participants; the data could be collected centrally and analyzed using a common method – before being given back to people as a set of insights/data.
Self experimentation in this context may be useful there’s a valid way for each “node” to be calibrated to an accurate baseline, and where environmental factors can be controlled for – or measured so closely that they can be subtracted with near-perfect accuracy.
Excuse me while I troll for a minute.
I did a pretty rough self-tracking experiment while reading this. The first 50% of the article I read at home, in the morning, while standing and I found it interesting and easy to get. I did the final 50% sitting at ITP at around 4:30PM and found it grueling (minus the final 3-4% where is becomes prophetic).
There is one thing painfully obvious about the middle portion of this article that was, in a way, pointed out about in the reading of A Billion Little Experiments where it’s emphasized that “putting ‘tracking’ above ‘easing of life’ is misguided and ineffective.” Putting ‘lots of words’ above ‘just doing it’ is misguided and put me to sleep.
Ok then. Moving along.
What I did find interesting was the idea that you can conduct an experiment on yourself and strive to disprove your initial hypothesis to curb a tendency towards bias. Also, I would agree where he says that there may be greater value in “the utilization of knowledge” rather than just more knowledge. That sums up what ITP is pretty well. What we do with existing technology and the meaning we give it is just as, if not more, important than new technologies. Likewise, utilizing existing healthcare techniques and knowledge through a behavior change will make a greater positive effect than inventing or discovering new techniques.
Try some stuff out. See what you learn. Apply what you can and hopefully it improves your life.
This reading indirect demonstrate the assumption of scientific methods can be applied to people’s life. However, as the writer mentioned that it is not easy to demonstrated that assumption is possible because self-experimentation has less control over their environmental and hereditary variables. In the reading, many examples of ‘A-B-A’ experiments imply that not quite accurate results they can get from as much as from animal experiment, but it is very important to understand that self-experiment is about all goals, bringing them into one’s life on a more personal level for greater self understanding. According to the progress of self-experiment, there will be time-consuming, analysis of our own behaviors,tension-producing, often disappointing for us to keep doing individual experiments. It must a proper, safe, and explicit methods to control the environmental outcomes. Here, I believe there will be a monitoring tool to do all the process for them. The point of this self-experiment is necessary to compare statements from the past to present that help experts to assist people’s affluent life. This article emphasizing a sharing data.
From the beginning my question of the actual effects scientific experimental method can be applied to human’s life, some criticisms in the reading help me to think over alternative way of self-experiment usages.
Account for experiments for human life, this article critics that it is not sufficient to understand people’s unconstrained behaviors in a natural environment, under highly controlled circumstances. This is because, according to more aspects of psychologist, people is freely unorganized and self-oriented, naturally.
However, we utilize others’ self-experiment results. As the self-experimenters will mostly concern of issues directly relevant to their own lives, they will affect other experimenters to study similar issues.
How we start with self-experiment? From the science, people can utilize to understand human behaviors? This article clearly suggests that best testable hypotheses will accurately guide us to avoid the pseudo-explanatory of randomly chosen expertise.
Furthermore, nowadays, we are exposed too much to the online environment. Sometimes, we loose our sights and we are interrupted from uncertain online resource. This self-experimentation will help us to do more self-control, as well.
For a self-experiment better, one increases variability in one’s life. Genetically diverse population is most successful at exploiting its environment. How we can keep our life diverse? It is already shown in advance this article, sharing data and keep the track with others. This is simple solution and now we need a tool for doing this. Tool must be simple and readily. Just not only from self-recordable note, but also digitizing input data from collecting self-monitoring, these both are useful to stimulate and increase variability in self-oriented life.
Life is rotating between people and people. we are supporting stimuli each others. Self-experiment is about significant interaction with others. Alike science progress, it has a progress: generation, check the results, and providing missing components. we need to invent somehow reliable, variable, and feasible device to assist human’s behavior, and problems in life.
I actually found the overall message of this article as useful—If a trained behavioral psychologists applied the scientific method to their own lives would that bring more insight to their studies of others? How does one use self-experiment to develop new discoveries? — This paper pushed me to ask a personal question: As a designer, can I a gain more insight from studying the behavior of someone else or from analyzing my self-behavior?
I have worked as an interaction designer for the last 3 years. I consistently have done my best work by putting myself in the shoes of the other person (the user). I work to understand how they might interpret the product, the website, or the interface in general; then I draw on those understandings to lead my designs. I have often found myself designing for things I know nothing about; which always is coupled by weeks of research. It this case, putting my self the shoes of the user has helped me greatly.
On the other side of the coin, I realized that I have come up with my best innovations and discoveries by designing something that has come from myself; something that I was passionate about and knew well. Those solid discoveries and insights have all been driven by self-understanding. My advisor at PARC always said you are best when you design something you know.
I thought about this context of this class. The importance of self tracking and self-experiment; how understanding our own selves better gives a power to relate to the world in a more useful way. I am interested to keep this message in for front of my design efforts; and see where it takes me and other people in the class in using self to discover useful tools for the world!
Neuringer admits that self-experimentation is wrought with inherent issues that can confound results and put into question any sort of conclusion. BUT, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, and it doesn’t mean we can’t all benefit from it. He claims the self-behavior analysis field is lagging (at least in 1981). Through structured exploratory personal analysis we can step outside our often robotic monotonous habitual daily lives and achieve worthwhile perspectives as well as compelling results that can be interpreted, shared, re-implemented, re-interpreted, and so on. The emphasis is not on any final product, but rather the integration of a “scientific” self-analysis process as a means of continually evolving on an individual micro- like scale. And if we all engage and share in these processes together, the effect has unlimited potential.
This emphasis on the group and sharing of results is something I really hadn’t associated with self-tracking. For the most part, I considered self-experimentation a very inwardly focused and, admittedly, selfish endeavor. Reframing it in the context of the larger group gives with the possibilities of positively influencing and being influenced by others makes the whole endeavor much more meaningful and exciting. I’m curious to see how, as a group, our class can benefit from the support and feedback we get from each other as we progress through our own individual processes.
As a follow-up to Fred’s aside, I read the whole article siting down at my desk in my apartment. I definitely flew through the first half of the piece, which I’d describe as much more account based, and I crawled through the second half, which I would describe as much more analytical. My thoughts – good, clear story-telling makes for easier communication, better comprehension, and more enjoyable reading.
I found, like many others in the class that the first half of this reading was easy to get through, the second half much harder. (To be fair, I was also lying down. Maybe if I had been moving around I might have absorbed more.) It started to drag out towards the end though when he began listing his points. I remember liking behaviorism when I first learned about it. The idea that we can boil the very intangible essence of ourselves into a simple explanation fascinated me.
However, I find it hard to compare self-experimentation with other experiments like a double-blind experiment. I just consider self-experimentation to be closer to case-studies, studies where one can draw a very loose conclusion that adds to a larger picture, but not one to be applied to a population. But, I do think in large large numbers, the data would begin to show reliable trends that would benefit the everyone.
The reading also made me think on just how there is a lack of a standard in self-experimentation because it’s usually inherently biased to the experimenter who also happens to be the subject. Just knowing you are partaking in an experiment can leave a significant change in your results.
So it seems there still a gap today between studies conducted in a lab and one conducted at home, but like the author was saying, perhaps the two can supplement and lend more meaning to each other.
I enjoyed reading about all the examples of self-experimentation that have been documented in journals, anecdotes of those performed by the author’s students, and the detailed self-experiments performed by the author on himself. The author then tries to address some of the objections to self-experimentation and lists many criticisms of experimental analysis, ending with the suggestion that self-experimentation is the next step in the evolution of the field.
I thought that the section where he describes several “consequences” of self-experimentation made a lot of interesting points. In particular, his discussion of “directed variability” as a pre-requisite to the occurrence of learning was an interesting way to explain how self-experimentation is helpful to an individual – by changing up our into our daily routines and habits in a structured way, we make a conscious effort to learn more about ourselves and come up with our own solutions to our own problems.
Expanding from the individual learnings that result from self-experimentation, there seem to be two ways that others can benefit from your results, should you decide to share them. One is they can be inspired by your story and motivated to try your experiment on themselves. Our guest speaker last week was a great example of this – he didn’t need any slides to tell his story because his results spoke for themselves (although a detailed schedule or record of exactly what he did to achieve his results would have been helpful). And the other is that the data from your experiments can be aggregated with others who performed similar experiments, from which more generalized theories and knowledge can be derived with the help of statistical analysis.
Can we can make the author’s imagined world – where self-experimentation, as an activity that improves individual lives while advancing scientific progress, becomes as common as watching TV – a reality?
neuringer heftily argues in favor of the scientific integrity and insight offered by experimental self-experimentation. his initial presentation of notable self-experimentations range from the amusing to grotesque, and are certainly exciting. but, most importantly he demonstrates two things: 1) the affect of self-tracking and recording as a catalyst for mindfulness for the researcher/subject and 2) the difficulty of quantifying and rating emotional/perceptional factors in self-experimental studies. it’s evident that self-experimentation can reveal patterns in individual behavior to improve the quality of life and performance for its practitioner. however, the research is commonly held to be subjective and unique by the scientific community.
neuringer counters that self-experimentation reveals patterns that extend to a wider audience. he argues that controlled regulated research environments don’t account for the randomness and variation of real-life. i find this argument a bit weak — individual subjective testing will never compare to the empirical validity of testing a hypothesis against large sets of variation. and that’s where i think neuringer misses the most powerful potential of self-experimentation — the aggregation of individual data into large powerful sets of data. data that can find patterns not only for the individual, but for groups of people — to gain insight about themselves from themselves, and each other. the potential of self-experimentation lies in the collection of these individual sets of data; the opening, sharing, and aggregation of data from individual-to-individual.
I had a strong suspicion that I was not going to support this scientific article when it ended the opening paragraph talking about “alcohol, orgasm, or acid.” Sure enough, like the other comments I see listed, I found the article a bit underwhelming.
I am immediately struck by how interesting it is that most quantified selfers seem to be average people and not scientists. Their goals are purely selfish and thus avoid one of the main issues presented in this article, that this movement needs to be incorporated into modern mainstream science. While the author does present a fascinating scientific history of self-experimentation, he seems to overestimate the potential for this line of work to gain acceptance within the professional scientific community.
As others have noted, he certainly does offer an accurate prediction of “self-experimental health groups, self-experimental child-rearing groups, self-experimental runners, self-experimental artists, and self-experiemental citizens for social change.”
Nonetheless, to defend an “unplanned A-B-A design, with number of ideas the dependent variable and the recording or absence of recording of daily activities as the independent variable,” is difficult regardless of whether your audience is fellow scientists or ITP students. Any scientific argument built on this foundation is sure to fail.
While the author did effectively predict some parts of the modern quantified self movement, he nonetheless seems to have underestimated the power of modern day sensors to automate the process and provide an objective data set. In this regard, his measurement of “interesting ideas” based on a “magnitude estimate the ‘novelty, goodness, or interest’ of each of the ideas generated.’” seems unnecessarily flawed. I think most quantified selfers would agree that such subjective distinctions are no basis for a self-experimentation.
It’s being 30 years since this article was published. 30 years in which science and technology had advanced significantly. But even in the 80′s talking about self-experimentation, I don’t think was a novel thing. I realized that I’ve done self-experimentation in many ways, many times. It is a natural human behavior, trying to understand how is it that our body works and responds to certain stimulus. At some point, everybody has experience how is to measure something about themselves and get into conclusions that might be or don’t be right.
What I like about the reading was the fact that is written. I mean, it made me think about all the times that I’d been wanted to understand behaviors and I started thinking about tracking things but they go out of my mind. I’ve never written everything about my little experiments. I think is very sassy to say that I found something about me that is correlated to another behavior. Scientists spend many years to prove their hypothesis, and I believe that the discipline to collect the data to be analyzed is a rigorous process that should taken into account to do self-experimenting.
Usually when I think about myself and the way I track my behaviors, I select the variable by my own taste and I do think that there should be a better way to compare those variables.
This makes me think about Nicholas Felton. He tracks every aspect of his life. He keeps doing it as a routine and after collecting the data, he sits and analyzed it, so when people reads his reports they can make correlations about his behaviors, but he doesn’t makes those decisions.
Anyway, this article opens my mind to think a lot of things related to my own health and the way we measure our own lives.
It was indeed interesting to read all this stories about self-experimentation and at the same time, it was showing how to develop self-experimentation further with objections of this.
It is tricky to make a platform for public in that it supposed to change individual’s behavior with their data. That means, this type self-experimentation platform should not only be universal but also be flexible enough to apply to many different type of circumstances.
Like the author mentioned in the objection part, the key point is up to how we can control the whole environment of this experimentation. Sometimes, it is not easy to recognize what is dependent variable, and what is independent variable. It is vague to see the relationship between two factors for every element are deeply related to each other. So we can’t see less food is first,or less sleep is first. Also life is not completely divided by day. Yesterday’s physical condition could affect on today’s condition.
If there are tons of less controlled environmental and hereditary facts in self-experimentation world, does the quantity of accumulated data affect to quality of result?
If so, how we can motivate people to record everyday life?
There is credence to the fact that self-experimentation can lead valuable information about the field that you find yourself in, esp one that relies on always analyzing others. It’s interesting that behavioural psychologists at the end of the day, turn out to be as fallible as anyone else, given that their work aims to bring into awareness and thus facilitate behaviour change.
Actors are all about self-experimentation. For many, the instinct to observe, not just others but also themselves leads to many a fascinating discovery about human nature. My acting teacher was well known for his LSD ‘trips’. Many actors who used claimed that it made them better actors.
The issues that he brings up with regard to why self experimentation is complicated seem to be losing ground in this age. Time and social norms may still hold true and self quantification might still have a way to go before it moves from early adopters to the mainstream, but the idea of tracking yourself and sharing it has already made headway with platforms like Foursqaure and status updates that urge you to think about and share how you ‘feel’.
My only question is whether the insights gleaned through self-experimentation are always for the better or if it could take us towards increased paranoia and competition. Like everything, moderation is the predictable answer here, but we humans are rarely interested in the grey. 23 & Me can be a great guide and aid or it can be a cause of fear and constant anxiety. I wonder if in the future, self measurement statistics will become a normal component of a Match.com profile, a health insurance prerequisite and a job determinant.
I appreciate reading about self-experimentation’s tradition of tracking the weird or off-colour: from excrement to LSD and everything in between. The many examples Neuringer give of eccentric inquiry give us as budding self-experimenters license to track something perhaps not so obviously practical and well covered that might lead to an important discovery. Also, I think Fogg’s examination of Persuasive Design could have used some more examples of sparks, facilitators and signals. That aside, I knew this paper would trigger (ha) a reaction that self experimentation is some sort of pseudoscience(and isn’t science a cultural construction also). But I think its important to remember self experimentation is purporting to be hard science performed in a clinical setting. Empiricism, especially today, is a valuable way for removing barriers to experimentation present at the many universities where the line between corporate funding and academia create a tension in interest (this was an ever-present debate at my undergrad).