Yes i haven't watched yet i know i know.

But here's an analysis no one asked for about why the wilds needed to have boys.

It Could Not Have Continued without the introduction of the boys. Very bold of me, i know.

But ultimately...gretchen is a scientist. A really shitty human but she's trying to prove a point. She's trying to say girls are better than boys. And in doing so, she created this entire social experiment to show that when faced with the worst, girls will band together and have a community. If it were girls in lord of the flies, none of that would have happened!

I would be very surprised to learn that people have taken a psych class and not heard of milgram and zimbardo but let me explain briefly anyway. Big names in social psych and two of the reasons why we now have institutional review boards with the standards that they have aka people who have to approve research to make sure it protects humans. Zimbardos prison experiment never should have gone on as long as it did because of the disastrous conditions that arose. Boys were randomly assigned guard or prisoner and very quickly the guards dehumanized and abused the prisoners because of their authority and power. Milgram also tested the role of authority but having someone in a lab coat tell participants to continue to administer shocks to someone even as they complained of heart pain. Suffice to say, many people complied, even going all the way to the death shock.

What's the point of me hashing out these experiments? Gretchen would know them. Gretchen would have learned about them. Hell she might even know zimbardo. And the thing is, as egregious as these were, they also majorly contributed to the field and THAT is why it matters. Gretchen is breaking so many ethical rules but she doesn't care because she thinks this is groundbreaking research and that she's gonna be commended for it. ( ofc she's going to lose absolutely everything when she tries to publish. As she should. I am by no means saying we should be doing anything like this. Most researchers would be like yeah we'd learn a lot but that's gonna harm humans so no. Gretchen said yes ❤️ ).

So what's the point of the boys? If Gretchen's entire thesis rests on this idea that girls are better than boys and will be more cooperative...she needs to compare them. I can get into all the other methodological issues like the fact that she self selected all these participants so she quite literally could have picked people that would give her the results she wanted ( and i would not put this past her ) or the fact that there was no randomization etc. But at the end of the day Gretchen needed a "control" group. The boys are this group. She needed to be like see!!! Look at how awful they are!!! Look at how much better the girls are!!! And without the boys that would be impossible. She won't let her life's work go down like that!!