A Social Influence Technique in Jonson’s The Alchemist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BEN Jonson’s satirical plays seek to reveal not only the uncontrolled appetites of their characters, but also the brilliant wit of their protagonists and their author himself. The plots of such plays as Volpone and The Alchemist feature frauds grounded in convincing practical psychology. The power of Jonson’s best plays can be attributed partly to his ability to exceed his own deep fascination with Galenic humouralism. Jonson’s innovative capacity to grasp the mechanisms which structure social interaction is especially well illustrated in The Alchemist. Here Jonson utilizes his understanding of a specific kind of social influence technique, termed the emotional see-saw in modern psychological literature, to enhance the comic effect of his plot and to credit the ‘teeming wit’ of con-artist protagonists and playwright alike.1 The emotional see-saw owes its name to Dariusz Doliński, who studied the dynamics of interrogations carried out by Soviet officers trying to make political prisoners confess. The cases of dissidents heroically refusing to answer any question while being tortured, only to confess after the officer hid the instruments of torture and simply asked his questions again, seemed especially interesting. Unlike the old bad cop–good cop trick, well known to anybody familiar with American police procedurals, these stories seemed counterintuitive. Prisoners confessed to the very interrogator who had already tortured them. Doliński’s experiments demonstrated that these two strategies of interrogation were based on the same psychological mechanism. This mechanism is simple: after experiencing fear, a person suddenly offered relief becomes very compliant for a short period of time. The mind concentrates on the source of fear; sudden relief prompts the frightened mind to switch from the alert mode back to its regular mode. During the switching process, the ability to think rationally and critically is significantly diminished. A frightened and then relieved person is thus likely to agree to any propositions presented just after perceiving the disappearance of the source of fear. This period of compliance is likely to last for no more than a quarter of an hour.2
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".