The good old days when ethics committees could be bribed with a bag of weed and a couple of tickets to see The Grateful Dead gave rise to some wacky soft science experiments, several of which are still famous today, and know by the psychologist behind them: Zimbardo, Milgram, Rosenhan. Cerrone should be up there too, for his Social Psychology experiment which asked “Would an otherwise sexy man who completely lacked a lower abdomen, in a basement designed to replicate an all-female cannibal village, be regarded as tasty?” Clockwise from top left:

a) Cerrone had to get veterinary doctors to perform the fourteen hour surgery that removed his lower abdomen and spine, and stitched his torso onto his pelvis. Even
then the surgical team feared for their licenses, and only agreed to pose in masks for the experimental record (Cerrone hoped to publish in The Journal of Psychiatry, The MCGTTD Journal, and Mad Magazine). That’s not a number 3, that’s some stray guts, and the dummy – looking thing on the table is Cerrone’s Honours student Vicki, taking a nap. It was a long surgery.

Cerrone and the veterinary team then recruited six women. There were also seventeen actor stand-ins (not pictured), seven chickens, a goat, and three dogs. The village quickly settled into their assigned roles, with the help of a seventy-two hour isolation session prior to entering the basement, during which they watched Spanish sitcoms non-stop while eating bon bons laced with cocaine and amphetamines.

b) “Raya” offered several torso-lengthening garments from the communal wardrobe which she was put in charge of due to her experience in amateur theatre productions. She said Cerrone would look “good enough to eat in this apple-green number”

c) “Magdala”‘s data was trashed due to the confounding variable of Cerrone’s plunging neckline. Magdala was Romanian, and found this too much like an old flame of hers, Vladismov the Inhaler.

d) “Mai” and “Su Lin”, in charge of the Soup Kitchen, found Cerrone tasty indeed. They swam with him in the inflatable paddling pool-cum-soup tureen for hours, because he reminded them of a tiny water buffalo. Ever heard of Stone Soup? This was their Stoned Soup version, and everybody loved it, even if it did taste a bit like someone had poured a few litres of mountain dew into it.

e) “Mrs Jones” thought Cerrone was so tasty she covered him in garnishes (pictured) at every turn.

f) “Johere” had a nibble of Cerrone. Here she is ten minutes later, an outlier in the data because she couldn’t walk for the entire rest of the experiment.

This sounds like a stupid experiment, doesn’t it? Cannibal Village? What kind of half-baked hypothesis is that? Where are the ostriches? This is why psychology is called a soft science. Prior to the Cerrone Experiment, psychology was known alongside Physics as a Hard Science. Cerrone’s prune fingers and toes after the soup bath meant that he made several errors in his notes, and the whole experiment was rendered void. The scandal, including several participants who got eaten, meant that the whole discipline lost its gold standard unassailable credibility. If not for those soft digits and a few pies, psychology would be sending us to Mars instead of going after gamers for exercising their rights to party.

Chaos, baby.