Three Identical Strangers is a documentary about triplets being separated at birth. Although the brothers were able to be reunited, what followed was the dark truth of why they were separated in the first place. Psychologist Peter Neubauer conducted a study using the three boys, giving one to a wealthy, a middle class, and a blue-collar family; the boys were essentially treated as "lab rats," their livelihoods tainted without their consent for a study on nature versus nurture. The ethics of this experiment were very flawed. There was not a valid enough reason, in my opinion, to run this study, as it is common sense to assume that the environment has some effect on a person's personality and livelihood. Even through observations, there is no practical application for this information, and the study actually never had a written conclusion. Furthermore, the young triplets did not give their consent to the experiment.
The worst part of all was that one of the consequences of the experiment was the death of Eddy. In C. Wright Mills' "The Promise," it is described that sociological imagination is the ability to view a situation in a social context and how interactions influence the situation. Pulling away from Eddy's suicide, we can truly see the devastating effects of untreated mental illness. In Peter L. Berger's "Invitation to Sociology," the reader understands what it is to look behind "the facades of social structures." He states that sociological consciousness possesses the "logical imperative to unmask the pretensions and the propaganda by which men cloak their actions with each other." In society today, there is a huge stigma on mental illness, and the fact that Eddy and the other two brothers were deliberately separated may have played a role in their mental health. The pressure to conform to society's standards definitely discouraged the brothers from seeking enough help.
David Brooks' "The Organization Kid" describes further how conformity to social norms is so deeply ingrained in people's minds. The article notes how students of Princeton University "rarely question authority" and obediently accept elitism. One point they make, what they call a "verbal tic," is that if a disagreement arises, students would deliver their views in the most non-confrontational way possible, oftentimes apologizing beforehand. Sociologist Robert Wuthow states in the article that "they are disconcertingly comfortable with authority...they're eager to please, eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them, eager to conform." The fact is that the students hold faculty in such high regard without questioning the reason why; it is just the social norm to call your professor by their last name rather than their first. Using sociological imagination reveals the underlying issues that society as a whole enables.
