The Science of Inappropriate Doodles

A little over ten years ago in graduate school I was the TA for a Research Methods in Psychology discussion section. Every week that fall, a group of ~200 students would have class in a large lecture hall with a Professor who taught them the basics of doing research in Psychology. Smaller subsets of those students would then have a separate weekly class with their TA, a graduate student who would further explain the concepts and help the students get hands-on practice doing research and writing the results in a formal paper.

After learning the principles of how to design an experiment, the students broke up into groups and designed experiments of their own that they could run on their classmates in the big lecture hall. There were certain restrictions. The students had to come up with independent variables to manipulate and a dependent variable to measure. The two independent variables had to be something easy to implement in a lecture hall, and the dependent variable had to be something that was easy to measure objectively, all in about 20 minutes and without violating ethical guidelines. Whew!

One of my groups picked a pretty difficult topic to assess scientifically – creativity. The challenge of finding an operational definition for something as amorphous as creativity was tricky, but my team did it. They found something called the 30 Circle Challenge, developed by a Stanford engineer named Bob McKim.

In this challenge meant to unlock fluid creativity one has 30 seconds to turn 30 circles into distinct recognizable drawings – eyeballs, bike wheels, the sun, etc. My research team decided to use this approach to quantify creativity by counting how many distinct drawings their classmates could make out of pairs of circles in one minute. Here is the worksheet they came up with, based on an ad campaign design by the Panamericana School of Art and Design:

So, with our dependent variable of Creativity locked in, the students next theorized that the best independent variable to manipulate that would affect creativity would be music. My team hypothesized that exciting music would encourage creativity while boring music would stifle it. For their independent variable, the student researchers decided they would play their classmates either dubstep (“Woo Boost” by Rusko) or “boring classical music” – the Moonlight Sonata (for the record, I disagreed with the “boring” epithet, but science is a democracy). They also looked at the color of the paper/writing as a variable and collected demographic data on sex and year of college.

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I still remember the beautiful fall Friday afternoon when this group stayed after class to finish tabulating their creativity handouts. The other students had left but we all stayed behind because we were having so much fun looking at all the drawings. Guess what happens when you put 200 college kids in an auditorium, hand them anonymized papers with two circles, and ask them to draw stuff?

So. Many. Penises.

We were having such a great time looking at all the (must be said – creative!) genital drawings it took us a while to notice the pattern. Interestingly enough, most of the sexual drawings seemed to come from women. What was even more intriguing was that a lot of them seemed to be listening to dubstep at the time! We ran the statistics to confirm our suspicions and lo and behold! There was an actual honest-to-goodness statistical trend.

Women listening to dubstep were the most likely to draw genitalia, p = 0.067

We were all highly amused and excited by our accidental scientific discovery and talked about taking it further, so I took our results to the professor in charge of the class. I told him we thought this was a really cool project and perhaps we needed to run it again with a bigger group and optimized variables to see if we could replicate this effect. Luckily, he also agreed this was interesting, and off we went.

I created an experimental protocol and got it approved through the University Human Subjects Research Review. We decided to keep the music the same and extend the amount of time people were given to draw in order to encourage more time for their minds to meander hither and… nether. The participants were told we were measuring creativity, and of course we did not try to steer them in any inappropriate directions. My team wrote informed consent forms asking students to participate in the study and debriefing statements to hand out at the end of the experiment that explained what we were actually trying to measure. We signed up to use the human subjects pool for psychology. In this system, college students taking psych courses sign up for studies – this gives them a credit toward passing their class, and faculty get subjects for experiments. We enrolled around 150 students who came in small groups to take the creativity test under our eager and watchful eyes. My team played dubstep or classical music and gave the participants 3 minutes to draw their doodles.

At the end of our experiment, we eagerly leafed through all the papers and found… Nothing.

Nary a nipple. A paucity of penises. A bereavement of breasts.

I was so confused! Why didn’t the results replicate the earlier finding? Was there just something electrifying about Lecture Hall 03 on that original sultry, sweaty fall Friday when the first experiment was conducted? Were the acoustics more seductive? Where did all the penises go?!

I then had an a-ha moment. Not a fun one like our original discovery. I realized that we probably destroyed our own effect!

In the original experiment, we had a huge group of students who were anonymous and a little giddy from doing weird psych experiments, seated closely together in a huge lecture hall. In our second experiment, our participants had to be scheduled outside their classes, so they showed up in smaller groups, sometimes one at a time. Despite my misgivings, my team was strongly encouraged to dress “professionally” for this experiment as they administered the instructions and turned on the music.

Imagine that. You are a college freshman, you come in for an experiment, and a well-dressed group of juniors stand there and pretend not to care what you draw on a little piece of paper while a bassline echoes through the otherwise empty room. I think only a truly deranged or fearless individual would draw genitalia on their test in these circumstances. And so it went, our ephemeral effect, fading into the annals of history.

We were still very proud of the work we did. I gained valuable insight into working with human subjects, something that a preclinical researcher doesn’t often get to do early in their career. I also got to be a PI and mentored a team of really fun students as they learned about hands-on research. We submitted our findings to the University Research Fair and presented our data in a poster later that year.

I think we all got a real taste of what it’s like to form an idea, see it take shape, and then have it take you away on an adventure of discovery to a land you didn’t even know about. Perhaps even more importantly, we learned that sometimes these ideas just don’t pan out, but the experience is still worthwhile. Sometimes I see the line “PI, supervisor, and mentor to a group of undergraduate students in an independent research project titled The Effect of Music on Creativity and Sexual Drawings” in my CV and think “Eh, do I take this out, does it look too weird?” and then always end up keeping it.

My advice? Always accept the side quest.