Adam Mastroianni’s ‘Invitation to a Secret Society’

FFrom the moment social psychologist Adam M. Mastroianni began publishing the blog “Experimental History” in early 2022, he knew something was different.

“It felt like being in alignment with the universe,” he says. After spending so much time trying to conform to the rigid standards of academic writing, he was finally using his own voice. “Being myself felt really good.”

He wrote about his favorite ideas in psychology, his views on pop culture, and his hot takes with articles like “The Dance of the Naked Emperors” and “Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs.” Unlike the traditional scientific paper’s scholarly detachment and dry writing, Experimental History brimmed with personality. Fans of the blog praised its readability, humor, and clarity. And more and more, he began to critique the structures of academic science — grant funding, bureaucracy, peer review — for their inefficiency and inequity.

Mastroianni is anything but an outsider. His path through science has been a waltz through the highest echelons of the academy — Princeton to Oxford to Harvard — with flourishes of achievement at every step.

In some ways, Mastroianni’s critiques of academic science are nothing new. Yet, compared to professors working to change the system from the inside, he is taking his criticisms a step further.

When he began his blog, Mastroianni was teaching negotiation to students at Columbia Business School while fitting in time for his research. But in the year and a half since, propelled by the rising popularity of his blog posts, Mastroianni has left not just Columbia but the academy altogether. In doing so, he hopes to chart an entirely new path for doing science — and open the door for others to do the same.

Mastroianni decided to become a social psychologist during his undergraduate years at Princeton. While reading Daniel T. Gilbert’s book “Stumbling on Happiness” for a class, he heard the Harvard professor was looking for research assistants and jumped at the opportunity.

“I was like, ‘Oh wow, this person exists. Like, he’s mortal,’” he says. He got the job in Gilbert’s lab that summer and never looked back, beginning a collaboration that would span the next decade.

According to Gilbert, their work together was a “marriage of true minds” from the beginning.

“We love to think together,” Gilbert says. “He’s creative, he’s original, he’s critical. He knows when two ideas are good, but one of them is also beautiful.”

After graduating with highest honors from Princeton, Mastroianni spent two years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship — which he describes as a “weird diversion” where he “mainly did standup and improv” — before returning to Gilbert’s lab at Harvard to do his Ph.D.

The accolades kept coming. While at Harvard, Mastroianni received near-perfect teaching evaluations, mentored students’ prize-winning theses, taught improv professionally in Boston, and began to publish his research in top scientific journals. The results of one paper were featured on Jimmy Kimmel, and another paper (this one co-authored with Gilbert) was published in Nature.

Somewhere along the way, Mastroianni began to question the structure of academic science.

“It was a series of small but accumulating degradations and revelations,” he says. He recalls attending an academic conference and realizing just how much institutional hierarchies governed his interactions.

“The first thing that people want to know when they talk to you is: how much respect do they need to give you?” he says. Often people would listen to him if they took him for a professor but quickly lose interest when they realized he was a graduate student.

This behavior struck him as highly hypocritical. Social psychologists studied the pernicious effects of power and hierarchy in other situations yet couldn’t seem to apply it to themselves. He asked himself, “If we can’t use the things that we know to live better and treat one another better, what is it we’re doing?”

Eventually, he came to view academia much like the board game “Monopoly.”

“You acquire these fake tokens of status,” he says, giving the examples of publications and citation counts. “And everything looks very real and important, just like it does when you’re very deep in a game of Monopoly. But at the end of the day, it is just Monopoly money.”

These doubts were already on his mind late last year when Mastroianni began drafting a paper about some recent studies he had conducted with fellow psychologist Ethan J. Ludwin-Peery.

There was a problem: He couldn’t figure out how to make the paper adhere to the conventions of a scientific journal. For one thing, neither he nor Ludwin-Peery could remember why they had run one of the trials, and Mastroianni was convinced that to admit such a thing would ruin his chances at publication in a prestigious journal.

That wasn’t the only issue. The draft was devoid of jargon. It lacked sufficient connections to previous research. It was also too funny.

“When I’ve submitted papers before, I’ve had reviewers say, ‘This is too fun,’” Mastroianni says. “And those were even with papers that were not intended to be fun.”

The draft with Ludwin-Peery, meanwhile, included a short discussion of the Polish holiday Dyngus Day, completely unrelated to the content of the studies.

In the end, Mastroianni and Ludwin-Peery decided to simply post the paper online, abandoning the chance at a journal publication, but also freeing the paper from the restrictions of a paywall. Gilbert thinks their paper would’ve been accepted in good journals, jokes and all.

Within 24 hours, the paper was going viral on academic Twitter.

“I had people saying, ‘I read this out loud to my eight- year- old this morning, and she understood it,’” he recalls. “People were saying, ‘We should write everything this way.’”

The unassuming blog post eventually received more attention — and substantive feedback — than the last paper he had published in a prestigious journal. But Mastroianni’s biggest moment of academic notoriety would come later.

The next month, after some hesitation, he published another blog post titled “The rise and fall of peer review.” The essay decried the review process as a “failed experiment” and argued that scientists should leave it behind. It was such a niche topic, he thought, that perhaps nobody would care. Instead, it provoked an even larger uproar than the psychology paper.

Hundreds of thousands saw the post, and their reactions ranged from high praise to sharp disapproval.

Gilbert is also skeptical. While he agrees that peer review could be improved, he would not go as far as to call it a failed experiment.

“I can’t read scientific papers in biology or physics,” he says. “I would like to hear what experts have to say. Peer review is nothing other than expert opinion.”

The success of the peer review post marked a turning point for Mastroianni. A month after the publication of “The rise and fall of peer review,” with Experimental History starting to command a loyal following, Mastroianni added a paid subscription option to the blog and began writing occasional subscribers-only posts.

“I realized enough people are reading this that I might be able to make a living doing this,” he says. “And wouldn’t that be pretty cool?”

This fall, Mastroianni left his position at Columbia. He’s not against returning to academia, but he doesn’t count on it.

If some university wanted to support his public-facing approach to science, he’d consider returning. “It’d be crazy to be like, ‘No, I want to go live in the forest just for the sake of living in the forest,’” he says.

For now, he says, “I will remain in the forest. But in the forest I’ll also build a community.”

In a July blog post titled “An invitation to a secret society,” Mastroianni announced he was starting a Discord server for people who wanted to do scientific research outside of traditional structures, which he says isalready more successful than he expected. One member has found collaborators to help start a community biology lab in St. Louis, while a number of other users are shedding fresh light on a psychological theory which fell out of favor in the 1960s.

In the future, Mastroianni hopes to build an independent, self-sustaining psychology lab he calls a Science House, similar to a Ph.D. program but with different, perhaps better, incentives.

Whether through the Discord or a Science House, Mastroianni’s overarching goal is to expand the possibilities for doing science. He points out how the hold academia has over what counts as legitimate science leads to a small, homogeneous group with disproportionate amounts of power over what should be studied, often leaving out people who are disadvantaged.

“I don’t think there’s any one lever you can pull that undoes injustice,” he says. “But I think one solution is to have many, many more paths.”

To Gilbert, the door is already open for nontraditional paths, at least for fields that don’t require expensive equipment.

“It’s not hard to do math in your bedroom,” he says. “No journal would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you sent us this wonderful paper. But since you don’t have an academic appointment, we won’t publish it.’”

Still, even if he isn’t about jump ship himself, Gilbert admires Mastroianni’s commitment to his ideals.

“He didn’t want to just take part in something that he thought was in such desperate need of repair. And that’s a lot of moral courage,” Gilbert says. “Everything that Adam does, he does out of the best motives, out of courage, concern, care.”

For Mastroianni, according to a blog post announcing his Discord server, “The answer is to turn up the weirdness. More wild hypotheses! More risky research! The useless ideas will die from disuse, but the useful ideas will live on.”

— Associate Magazine Editor Hewson Duffy can be reached at hewson.duffy@thecrimson.com.