“Why Does Patriarchy Persist?” 1: The Still-Face Experiment

Roy Herndon Smith

This post is the first in a series of discussions of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider (Polity Press 2018). This post concludes: Patriarchy persists, in part, because it institutionalizes the contradiction between the good we believe we are doing (in Gilligan and Snider’s case, resisting patriarchy) and the cruelty (in Gilligan and Snider’s case, the emotional abuse exemplified in The Still-Face Experiment) we unconsciously perpetuate.

You who are all turn
away

You who are all turn
back

You who are all are
still

You who are all are
not

Smiling
Still not

Pointing
Still not

Reaching
Still not

Shrieking
Still not

Turning away
Still not

Turning back
Still not

Crying
Still not

Turning away
Still not

Crying
Still not

You are
Still not

All is
still

All is
not

A friend wrote a favorable review (Michael Johnson, http://geo.coop/story/moving-and-out-patriarchy) of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider (Polity Press 2018). I bought the book. About halfway through the “Introduction” (p. 11), I read the authors’ description of watching a YouTube video of Edward Tronick’s Still-Face Experiment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0):

At the opening of the film, we see a mother and her one-year-old baby engaged in responsive play, cooing and gesturing in an ongoing and pleasurable exchange. When following Tronick’s instruction the mother becomes still-faced and stops responding to her baby, the baby instantly registers the loss of connection. She moves to engage her mother by repeating the sounds and gestures that had previously elicited her response. When the mother ignores her efforts and remains still-faced, we see pleasure drain from the baby’s body and face. And then it becomes almost unbearable to watch as disorganization sets in and we hear a cadenced relational voice give way to a shrill high-pitched screeching.

The authors describe their relief when the mother finally reaches back to, holds, and speaks gently to her child, who continues to cry, then gazes at her mother with a not quite still-face, then responds by reaching out and laughing.

I turned away from reading at this point. The authors had, two pages earlier, used the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice, in obedience to God, his son Isaac, as an example of how patriarchy requires us to sacrifice love in order to be accepted by hierarchical Power. Now they were using, apparently uncritically, this modern child sacrifice to “Science” as “a vivid and easily accessible demonstration of how tuned in we are as babies by showing how quickly an infant picks up and responds to changes in the relational weather.” They seemed wholly untuned in to how they were repeating what the mother, in obedience to the unseen, unheard experimenter, had done to her baby. They had, despite their recognition that watching the video was “almost unbearable,” responded to the torture portrayed in it with the equivalent of a still face; they, following the lead of the experimenter, used the torturing mother and the tortured child to demonstrate a theory; they treated the mother and child as means, not persons. And just as the mother, by deliberately turning away from the infant and turning back with a still face, changed “the relational weather,” so did they, and in the same way—all was horror.

The child in the video turned back to her still-faced mother, and I turned back to reading the book with the hope—a faint hope, given what they had written thus far—that the authors would acknowledge the torture and do something to stop it from happening again. After all, one was a prominent and powerful feminist ethicist and psychologist; the other had a law degree and had been “forging a career in human rights” (p. 31). They were writing a book on how to resist patriarchy’s reign of injury and torture. Surely they were going to use the still-face experiment to expose the regime of objectifying scientism as an expression of patriarchal cruelty we must confront and resist.

They did not. The mother in the video only acknowledged the torture her baby had just endured with a momentary concerned look, a kiss, and an “Okay…I’m here,” as if the still face had happened when she was not “here,” and now that she was “here,” all was “okay” again. She did not acknowledge, either verbally or nonverbally, that she was the one who afflicted her baby. Instead, she returned to what Tronick calls the “normal” and “good” play with her daughter. Similarly, the authors, after their brief confession that watching the video is “almost unbearable,” return to what they consider to be the “good” work of examining patriarchy in order find ways to resist it; they repeatedly use the torturing mother and tortured child to illustrate how patriarchy afflicts us and how we, like the mother in the experiment who “repairs the rupture in the relationship” with her baby, can repair the ruptures patriarchy causes in our relationships with each other.

As the authors recognize, but not in relation to the experiment, staying silent about an injury and responsibility for an injury, as the mother, experimenters, and authors do with the child, perpetuates and exacerbates, rather than repairs, the injury. The authors tell the story of “Jackie,” a college student whose friend raped her. She remained silent after her rape in an attempt to resume what Tronick might call her “normal” and “good” life. Her rapist also remained silent. She heard that he continued to assault women. As a result of her examination of her silence in a class with Gilligan, she wrote a letter to her rapist about her anger at him and about “the ways” she “had … protected him at the expense of” herself. In response to her letter, her rapist did what the mother in the still-face experiment, the experimenter, and the authors did not do in response to the injured baby, he acknowledged that he injured her and said that he felt “badly” about it. But he did not indicate that he was doing anything to understand the reasons why he was abusing women and to stop himself from continuing to abuse them (p. 140). A reparative response by one who injures another requires, as Gilligan and Snider recognize in relation to the rapist, acknowledging the injury and one’s responsibility for it, working to understand the reasons why one has injured the other, and doing what one can to stop oneself and others from repeating the injurious behavior.

The mother and the experimenters in the original still-face experiment (with a 70-day-old infant, first reported on in 1975) and the more recent one we have been discussing, and Gilligan and Snider are not alone in their failure to acknowledge, take responsibility for, understand the reasons for, and work on repairing and preventing the repetition of the injuries done in these experiments. Since the original experiment, the “still face” has become “a common procedure” in research on children between birth and two and a half years (Lauren B. Adamson and Janet E. Frick, “The Still Face: The History of a Shared Experimental Paradigm, Infancy, 4(4), 451-473, 2003). Numerous people, including Gilligan and Snider, have used, without recognizing the tragic irony in what they are doing, reports on and videos of these experiments to illustrate the destructive and traumatic effects on babies of adults’ unempathetic responses to them.

The still-face procedure violates two ethical principles governing research on human subjects, set forth in The Belmont Report (1979) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3593469/):

“Human subjects should not be harmed.” The still-face experiments obviously harm the babies who are the subjects of the experiments. The still face is an instance of what is commonly called “psychological abuse.” Other research has shown that such “maltreatment” is the “most harmful form of abuse” (https://childhoodtraumarecovery.com/all-articles/psychological-maltreatment-most-harmful-form-of-abuse-evidence-from-major-suggests/). Repetitions of the still-face procedure with the same children have shown that this harm is lasting and physical, as well as psychological and emotional https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/09/16/affects-of-child-abuse-can-last-a-lifetime-watch-the-still-face-experiment-to-see-why/?utm_term=.b5722f716fd4). Less obvious and not yet explored is the harm these experiments do to the mothers and fathers who directly afflict the babies, to the experimenters who construct this affliction, and to all who observe the videos or read accounts of the experiments.

“Research should maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harm.” The harm the experiments do is obvious. The benefits—confirmation and educative demonstrations of theories about child development and the effects of emotional neglect and abuse—could have been and have been gained using observational studies of adult-child interactions.

Despite these blatant violations, an internet search turned up only one brief mention, in an article published in 2017, more than forty years after the original still-face experiment, of an ethical evaluation of the procedure (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5542453/#sec005title): “The study has been reviewed and approved by the Ethical Committees of the University of Dundee and the Albert Szent­Györgyi Medical University, Szeged.” The article gives no reasons for the approval.

In conclusion, when Gilligan and Snider describe and then repeatedly refer to the still-face experiment, without reflecting on the ethics of the procedure, they inadvertently expose two ethical contradictions and construct one more: 1. The experiment itself is an ethical contradiction. It uses a procedure that injures children to show that the procedure injures children. 2. Researchers who have repeated the procedure and those who use it to illustrate the injurious effects of relational breaks institutionalize the original ethical contradiction. They make injuring children a “common,” and even normative, procedure for showing how doing what the experiment does injures children. 3. Gilligan and Snider perpetuate this institutionalized ethical contradiction when they uncritically use the experiment to support their contention that patriarchy systematically injures everyone by institutionalizing relational breaks like the ones the experiment institutionalizes.

Gilligan and Snider thus unintentionally enact an implicit answer, other than the ones they explicitly provide, to the question that is the title of their book. Patriarchy persists, in part, because it institutionalizes the contradiction between the good we believe we are doing (in Gilligan and Snider’s case, resisting patriarchy) and the cruelty (in Gilligan and Snider’s case, the emotional abuse exemplified in The Still-Face Experiment) we unconsciously perpetuate.