2014-11-14
Explanation
The Joke
A bald villain in a lab coat announces that he has captured every single affluent white college student, and with every passing second he conducts more opinion surveys. He has amassed enormous data and will now speculate about how to destroy the world, cackling maniacally. The caption below reads: "I'm sorry, but mad sociology is not a real mad science."
The Humor
The comic parodies the "mad scientist" trope by replacing hard science with sociology. Instead of building a doomsday device or creating a monster, this villain's evil scheme involves conducting surveys on a narrow demographic (affluent white college students) and extrapolating grand conclusions from them. This is a pointed satire of a real criticism of social science research: that many sociology and psychology studies rely heavily on samples drawn from college student populations (often called WEIRD samples -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), which are not representative of humanity as a whole. The punchline -- that "mad sociology is not a real mad science" -- plays on the dismissive attitude some people have toward social sciences compared to "hard" sciences like physics or chemistry, while simultaneously poking fun at the methodological limitations of survey-based research.
References
- WEIRD samples: A well-known critique in behavioral science, articulated by Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010), pointing out that the vast majority of psychology research subjects are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies and may not be representative of humans generally.
- The mad scientist is a stock character in fiction, typically portrayed as a brilliant but insane researcher bent on world domination or destruction through scientific means.