2014-05-08
Explanation
The Joke
A researcher asks a colleague, "You ever fantasize about locking 100 babies in a plain white room at birth, then returning 10 years later to see what they're like?" The colleague reacts with horror: "No! ... Dear God no!" The caption reads: "I could tell immediately that he wasn't cut out for developmental psych research."
The Humor
The joke plays on the gap between what sounds monstrous in everyday conversation and what would actually be an ideal experiment in developmental psychology. Researchers studying child development would love to conduct controlled experiments isolating nature from nurture — raising children in environments stripped of cultural influence to see what behaviors are innate. Of course, such experiments are wildly unethical and would never be approved, but the comic suggests that a "true" developmental psychologist would at least find the idea intellectually tantalizing rather than immediately horrifying. The humor lies in reframing a clearly sociopathic fantasy as simply professional enthusiasm, and in the implication that the field selects for people who think this way.