One and Twenty Dollar Conditions

The E continued: Is that fairly clear how it is set up and what we’re trying to do? [Pause.] Now, I also have a sort of strange thing to ask you. The thing is this. [Long pause, some confusion and uncertainty in the following, with a de- gree of embarrassment on the part of the E. The manner of the E contrasted strongly with the preceding unhesitant and assured false explanation of the experi- ment. The point was to make it seem to the S that this was the first time the E had done this and that he felt unsure of himself.] The fellow who normally does this for us couldn’t do it today—he just phoned in, and something or other came up for him—so we’ve been looking around for someone that we could hire to do it for us. You see, we’ve got another subject waiting [looks at watch] who is supposed to be in that other condition. Now Professor -, who is in charge of this experiment, suggested that perhaps we could take a chance on your doing it for us. I’ll tell you what we had in mind: the thing is, if you could do it for us now, then of course you would know how to do it, and if something like this should ever come up again, that is, the regular fellow couldn’t make it, and we had a sub- ject scheduled, it would be very reassuring to us to know that we had somebody else we could call on who knew how to do it. So, if you would be willing to do this for us, we’d like to hire you to do it now and then be on call in the future, if something like this should ever happen again. We can pay you a dollar (twenty dollars) for doing this for us, that is, for doing it now and then being on call. Do you think you could do that for us?