Human Test Subjects

Last night, after much fun during the day, Orli, Russ, Keith, Cora and I sat down to play Morton’s List. Now, for those of you who’ve never heard of this game, it’s basically a list of hundreds of different things to do, and you roll a set of dice to randomly select your task for the evening. The trick to the game is that you can’t back out, or switch to another task, unless it’s physically impossible to complete the first one. The tasks are very varied - the last two times we played we got “relax” and “protest something”.

This time, we rolled the task “Human Test Subjects”. The description for Human Test Subjects was, I swear to god, a paraphrase of the first page of my Div III. Essentially, we were told to conduct a psychological experiment. While everyone else was at a loss, I eagerly proposed an extension of the experiment I have been trying unofficially to conduct all year. Some of you may remember that time I made Nick, after much yelling and protesting by others, eat a spoonful of his own saliva. As a scientist, I felt compelled to find out - was Nick such an anomaly? Are people really that opposed to eating their own spit? Are certain types of people more or less likely to eat their own spit? Does having just eaten make them more or less likely to eat their own spit?

So, we stole some spoons from an ice cream store and walked up and down Northampton asking people to eat their own spit for us. (People frequently asked us where we went to school. When we said Hampshire, we got a lot of laughs and one “You can get credit for anything there!”)

Anyway, here are the results:

We approached 37 subjects, fifteen males and twenty-two females, all in groups of two or more. 19 out of those 37 subjects (51%) ate their spit for us. Females (12 out of 22, 54%) were slightly more likely to than males (7 out of 15, 46%), a difference that was not significant (t = 1.69, p = .54). We also compared responses when we asked subjects who were standing outside of an ice cream store vs. walking on main street. Here we found that subjects who had probably just eaten (9 out of 20, 45%) were less likely to eat their own spit than those who had (10 out of 17, 59%), a difference that was also not significant (t = 2.03, p = .42). While these variables did not appear to influence outcome, we did notice that female subjects had a tendency to approach the challenge socially, with two groups (five women total) agreeing “If you’ll do it, I’ll do it”. Another female asked the group of males she was with, “Should we all do it together?” to which she got no response.

Conclusion: We are dorks.

(Originally published June 2007.)