With the mid-August weekend marquee offering blockbuster films such as BlacKkKlansman, Mission: Impossible-Fallout, The Spy Who Dumped Me, and the latest version of Mamma Mia as respite from the heat, we sought refuge in what we thought would be a nearly empty screening of an obscure-sounding documentary.
So did others. Riverdale 10 had a nearly full house for a mid-afternoon showing of Three Identical Strangers. Judging from the rapt attention being paid, the audience wasn't there for the air conditioning and popcorn.
The premise of the film: Identical triplets, put up for adoption in the early 1960s, are taken in by three different families and raised without any knowledge that the others exist. When, at the age of 19, a chance meeting leads them to discover each other, there's much joy, sibling bonding, and media attention. Lots of media attention.
All this positivity takes a strange turn when it dawns on the parents that they were never told their children, all placed through the prestigious Louise Wise adoption agency in New York, were triplets. They thought the regular home visits by researchers filming and photographing and conducting cognitive and behavioral tests on their kids were part of a routine psychological study.
It was much creepier than that.
As it turns out, the Wise agency, in cahoots with Manhattan's Child Development Center, surreptitiously organized the separation of the triplets (along with several sets of twins) as unwitting subjects of a long-range study by Freudian psychiatrist Pete Neubauer.
An Austrian Jew who escaped to Switzerland during the Nazi occupation, Neubauer arranged to have the siblings placed with families of varying socioeconomic backgrounds in order to study study the effects of nature and nurture.
The results of the study were never published, and the research is stowed away at the Yale library, sealed until 2066--by then, most if not all involved would be dead. (After the film's release, some of the subjects were supplied with redacted documents from the study, but nothing indicative of the study's results, if there were any.)
The film focuses on the difficult outcomes of the triplets--after a very public reunion loaded with breathless anecdotes about the brothers' similarities despite their disparate unbringings, there are revelations about all the aspects that make them different. These become more evident as their promising futures--hello, Hollywood?--eventually diminish, replaced by the next big thing. It seems audiences were fickle even before social media.
One of the triplets, who suffered from depression and other mental health issues, took his life. Another was charged and acquitted of involvement in the death of an elderly woman during a robbery. The third just seems weary and sad.
So what does an experiment like this say about nature and nurture? Would the triplets' lives have turned out differently if they grew up together?
"I studied psychology at university, and in the '50s and '60s," says Tim Wardle, the film's director, in an interview with Vice. "It was kind of like the Wild Wild West. ... They were doing things that today we consider totally unethical."
In a separate interview with Sundance Institute, he said, "I hope audiences will go on a journey with the film and give themselves over to it and start in one place and let it take them on an extraordinary journey. But I also hope that it will make them think about wider questions about destiny, free will, the importance of family, adoption, genetics, ethics--some pretty heavyweight themes in there."
The triplet experiment, while ethically unconscionable, bears a resemblance to the operant conditioning theory of Harvard behaviorist B. F. Skinner: Behavior is determined by its consequences--negative or positive reinforcement--which make it likely that the behavior will occur again. Skinner believed the only scientific approach to psychology was one that studied behaviors, not internal subjective mental processes.
Skinner's method was all about behavior modification, a step-by-step program involving setting goals which would help determine how the subject would change to reach the desired state. It worked fine on lab rats and pigeons. Especially fascinating is intermittent reinforcement, random rewards that have nothing to do with exhibiting the desired behavior--that's what brings people back to slot machines and on-again, off-again romantic relationships.
Sounds reasonable, right? But anyone who's tried to train a pair of puppies knows that consistent reward-and-discipline efforts don't always guarantee similar results. Those dogs, no matter how young they are, come with personalities. And so do children. The triplets were surely influenced by their diverse families as they matured. But they brought themselves--good and bad--into the mix.
Within each of us is a control center that calls the shots. We are all liable to the influences of nature and nurture. And yet we are all entirely ourselves.
Karen Martin is senior editor of Perspective.
kmartin@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 08/19/2018