While you will also find on this website my CV and list of publications, this blog has been initially created to describe how I run field studies in neuroscience. At the moment you will find the research project that I conducted in Rwanda, the project with the military and the projet with inmates in prisons. Soon will come the description of research projects in Cambodia and Israel.
Field research is not very common in neuroscience. As a consequence, we, neuroscientists and psychologists, know almost nothing about human cognition from cultures present in parts of the world where neuroscience do not exist (e.g., central Africa, indigenous tribes in Asia or in central America, etc.). Neuroscience mostly only focuses on WEIRD individuals, that are, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. This has to change if we want neuroscience to reach the next level in terms of comprehension of the human brain.
The aim of this blog is to show that despite all the difficulties that it involves, conducting field research totally worth it – not only as a human experience but also to study human cognition at a broader level.
I will also share my experience as a researcher working on obedience to authority. When the public reads scientific articles or books, they can appreciate the scientific results, but they usually have no idea about what happened behind the scene. Undoubtedly, working on themes associated with obedience to authority, with populations such as the military, inmates in prisons or victims and perpetrators in Rwanda and Cambodia makes that I have experienced a high number of crazy human interactions, life experiences and anecdotes. They range from the best excuses that my participants told me to justify sending shocks to someone else; to a woman running and yielding at me with a machete because I was taking a picture of a landscape in Rwanda; to an inmate in prison who told me and my student that he could put us in a trash bin and bring us to his cell and that no one would notice it; to blood-curling interviews with former perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda; to deep feelings of compassion for inmates in prison who thanked us to do research activities with them during the covid-19 pandemic as it gave them the impression to exist for the outside world and provide them some human interactions during two hours. Across the pages of this blog, I will thus offer an inch of what it is like to conduct research on obedience to authority.
So please, do not hesitate to contact me for collaborations or research projects that will send me on unexplored lands!
Emilie Caspar's Blog 