Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

The experiment

The researcher laughed when she saw my outfit: a doctor's lab coat, pajama pants and flip-flops.

It was all they gave me to change out of my clothes. But it didn't matter much how I looked, just as long as I had no metal on me. Soon I'd have to lay inside the giant machine, the magnets of the MRI working to take snapshots of my brain.

Yep, I had become a lab rat. Science experiments sometimes need test subjects. And so during this past weekend I volunteered as one.

This all started when a few months back I saw a posting. Made by Peking University, it was entitled  "Psychological Experiment is waiting for you~" What caught  my attention was how the flyer was specifically looking for Chinese-Americans to participate, even offering to pay $22 per test subject. I had always wanted to volunteer for a science experiment so I thought why not.

This Saturday I finally had some time to come by. The experiment itself was pretty straight-forward. I'd have to answer several rounds of questions, lasting about an hour, while the researchers recorded the results and scanned my brain with the MRI.

As for what purpose this all served I could only guess. "We can't tell you because it may influence you when you take the test," one of the researchers said. All the flyer said was that the experiment had something to do with empathy.

After changing out of my clothes, my was body slotted inside the cavity of the MRI. While I lay there, two small mirrors were placed over my head, reflecting the image of a nearby computer screen. Once the experiment began, the computer screen began to show me questions,  with my hand carrying a small remote allowing me to answer "yes" or "no".

I had no idea what to expect, but I ended up finishing the experiment a tad disturbed.

During the main section of the testing, the experiment revolved around one central question: "Does this person feel pain?"

To answer this, the computer screen showed me several videos of both men and women, who were either white or Asian. The videos either displayed the person being poked in the cheek with a Q-tip, or being jabbed in the face with a needle syringe. Naturally I picked "no" for the Q-tip prodding, and "yes" for the face stabbing videos.

But what was interesting was how the people featured in the videos showed no expression of pain whether being poked by the Q-tip or pierced by the syringe. I quickly caught on. Wanting to be smart, I started saying "no" to the pain question, even as needles kept pricking the faces of these poor people. (Of course, they weren't really being stabbed by a syringe, but still I cringed a bit. Then after a while I didn't much care; stab as much as you like.)

When the testing was done, I was finally told what the experiment was about. One of the researchers, a graduate student in Peking University's Psychology Department, said they've been studying how empathy works among people of different races.

They had noticed that when this experiment was given to native Chinese people, they showed more empathy for the Asian people being pierced by the syringe, and less for the white people. At the same time, the reverse was true for white people who took the test; less empathy for the Asian people, and more people for the Caucasian subjects who were pricked with the needle.

The researcher explained this could be due to evolutionary reasons embedded in our genes. When humans were evolving, they might have developed a negative response toward people who looked different from them, perhaps thinking that they were a possible enemy.

But another explanation, the researcher said, is that a person's empathy response could be molded by their culture and how he or she was raised.

As a result, the researchers looked for Chinese-Americans to partake in the experiment. Although genetically Asian, they also grew up in a western culture surrounded by people from other ethnicities.

Would the Chinese-Americans show empathy for both white and Asian people being stabbed by syringes? Or would they only feel compassion for only one group?

Not enough data has been collected to say in which way they lean, the researcher said. But in my case, I initially showed empathy for both groups. And then I  showed none, not caring who who would get stabbed in the face. I feel like I've almost condoned torture.

(One perk about participating in the experiment is that I've finally seen what my own brain looks like. The researchers were kind enough to give me these pictures. But looking at it kind of makes me wanna throw up.)