He was elated. He wanted to jump up and click his heels together. He pictured himself holding hands while he drove to some beach somewhere. (He'd have to practice steering with just one hand.) He fought a sudden urge to run over to Wanda's Flowers and pick out two dozen bright red roses complete with photogenic little droplets of water spotting the ruby petals. Vernor stood up, but his knees shook so he sat right back down again. "It really, really worked," he said to the picture of himself on his desk. He picked it up and kissed himself.
It was a simple experiment, really. He had just duplicated the University of Chicago's "formula" for love discovered in experiments in 1986. Vernor had read about them in the S.F. Chronicle; for some reason, Science magazine and all the respectable journals had not deigned to publish the details. But the AP newswire article had everything Vernor needed to know. The researchers had taken volunteers (all heterosexuals, Vernor assumed) and told them to sit down in front of a volunteer of the opposite sex. They were told to stare deeply into their partners' eyes and talk about embarrassing incidents from their childhood.
Love was produced in 28% of the volunteers. Vernor admitted that it was hard to quantify -- in a scientific way -- the amount of love produced, but it was hard to argue with the fact that at the end of the experiment, 18 people had said that they were in love with their partner, someone who they had only met at the beginning of the experiments a week before.
Vernor naturally had had his doubts. Clearly replication was in order. And if successful, given corroboration of the original experiment, there were many theoretical avenues to explore: What if there were only two days of conversation, instead of one week? What about having a control group discuss baseball statistics? Suppose the partners were of the same sex for heterosexuals and opposite sex for homosexuals? Would the same results arise from if you talked about embarassing incidents from someone ELSE's childhood?
Vernor was fascinated by these aspects and many more. He immediately applied for a department grant to begin his own study. But the department head had been skeptical. "Look at yourself, Vernor," Dr. Allen had said. "Here you are, almost a full professor with a solid research background and a widely reprinted doctoral thesis about language acquisition. What does a psycholinguist such as yourself want to do with tabloid science?" But Vernor had finally talked him into it, agreeing to teach an extra seminar or three of Pysch. 101 in exchange. Anything for something different, something that could shake up the establishment of bitter old researchers rehashing Cognitive Assonance Affix Hopping and Code Switching among Sensosory-Deprived Juveniles in Pre-Industrial Societies or whatever else the dreary symposiums were about this week.
Vernor was fanatical in his attention to detail. He closely supervised every aspect of the experiment. He watched intently as his volunteers told each other of the time during third grade when they had wet their pants, or the time that their mother had made them wear bright yellow dresses that were too short, or that they had thrown up in front of everyone in the cafeteria.
The difficult part was to make sure that deep eye contact was maintained by his subjects at all times. Vernor had watched closely to make sure.
That was my mistake, he realized. And now I'm deeply, madly,
hopelessly in love with forty-eight volunteer undergraduates.
Based on a
newspaper article
from the San Francisco Chronicle.