What is a social experiment?
Doesn’t it kind of feel like everything is a social experiment? At least everything we humans do? And, I guess we sometimes involve animals in our social experiments in many ways. Is that consensual?
So what is a social experiment?
Maybe it is when we humans decide to try something on a large enough scale that it affects a lot of people, relative to population size. And maybe these types of experiments over the years have combined to create the social reality that we all live with now. Maybe early social experiments were various scales of communal living. Maybe a family, then a clan, then a tribe, a society. It got a little more complex as community size increased. I don’t know. I’m just theorizing.
Maybe a need for another experiment arose: As group size increased there needed to be some sense of norms, rules, mores, to keep order and cohesion. These needed to be decided upon. But by whom? The elders? And how would that sense of norms, rules, mores, be established, transmitted, and enforced? Is this how the experiments with government began? Or maybe religion?
Is human society the original social experiment that set up the conditions for all of the other social experiments?
Things just expanded and convoluted from that point on?
And who is running these experiments? People who have varying levels of power within these human societies?
Do they have our consent to experiment upon us? Sometimes yes? Sometimes no? Do we even know when we are being experimented upon?