Jukebox

(Crossposted from https://jukeboxemcsa.wordpress.com/2023/06/24/early-bird-sneak-peek-keep-it-between-the-lines/)

Hi all! It’s time for another Early Bird Sneak Peek, where I share a glimpse at the story my lucky Early Bird patrons will be enjoying next Saturday thanks to their pledges at my Patreon page! Of course, if you’re not an Early Bird patron, you’ll still get a story next week–“A Key to Nothing”, teased previously, has already been submitted to the EMCSA. But the Early Bird patrons will be getting “Keep It Between the Lines” (MC FF)!

Dr. Zvjezdana Knezevic, the unethical research psychologist from "X, Y and Zee", is back with another one of her case studies. This time, she's studying the phenomenon known as "groupthink", the tendency of an individual to go along with the consensus opinion even when it's obviously wrong... but are they just going along to get along, or are their thoughts and beliefs legitimately being molded by constant gaslighting? Doctor Zee is just the woman to find out! Here's a taste:

Subject K was selected for what she was told was a study on sensory perception, a test designed to be exceedingly simple--eighteen sets of parallel lines nine inches long were provided, each one with a sine curve drawn between them, and K and her group were instructed to indicate whether the curves touched, overlapped, or remained within the boundaries provided by the parallel lines. K completed a full psychological profile three days in advance of the experiment, and was led to believe that all the other participants she was with had completed similar evaluations and came from similar backgrounds.

In reality, the other participants were selected from a pool of this researcher's previous subjects who participated in a longitudinal study on psychological dependency (and who were themselves originally selected from the results of prior experiments in which they demonstrated strong tendencies toward deference to authority figures that made them prime candidates for those studies. For more on this, see the currently archived series of extracts on sexual conformity and psychological dependence, which this researcher still hopes to publish one day once the psychological community is sufficiently convinced of the value of said research.)

Hope you enjoy it!