alt Hacker News> More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
This doesn't explain the difference between the collective farm workers, who were actually forced by the government to change their lives, and the villagers who were not forced to change their lives. Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
> the villagers who were not forced to change their lives
They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments.
> Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.