The data on this lab and my own experience as a participant do not support the view of humans as machines. Inconsistencies in the data are evident, a fact which supports the many complexities that constitute the brain and human activity. Machines are always functioning in the same exact way, regardless of any external adjustments/influences made in the environment including emotion, distractions, etc... Machines run on a battery that is solely made based upon concepts of physics, chemistry, and mathematics. A human is made of so much more than just organic molecules - anything can change the way we behave or respond; humans are unpredictable, hence the inconsistency of the results of this lab. Humans also function based off of different degrees of motivation: I did not keep track of the 2 seconds my partner waited before she threw the ruler after the first two or three trials. I remember having fun with guessing and anxiously waiting for the ruler to be dropped. Machines do not have motivation - they have an on/off button.
I agree with you that the data from the lab does not seem to show that humans are machines. The inconsistencies do seem to show, as you said, other factors such as motivation affecting the reaction time. During my own experience I also noticed other factors such as the environment around me and my own expectations about my performance affecting me. I think the data from this lab shows that human behavior is not purely biological/mechanical and that our higher level of thought differentiates us from machines.
I share the same opinion. This lab does not truly bring to mind a machine. When one thinks of a machine, perfectly consisten repitition comes to mind. This lab demostrated the large range of possiblities of a single human behavior. My reaction times were as low as 140 milliseconds and as high as 240. There did not seem to be a consistent pattern, even enough to differentiate between my dominant and non-dominant hand. The data just seemed like random variation in a relatively large range. It seems like if the experiment were to prove that human are in a way "machines", the behavior would have to have less variation.
Although I agree with the other posters here in that the results of this lab appear to contradict the supposition that humans are machines, I disagree that humans "are made up of much more than organic molecules." As the history of psychology and biology have shown, humans seem to be nothing more than a highly complex system of electrical and chemical processes. For instance, studies on split-brained people show that even "conscious" humans are susceptible to the limitations imposed by their split physical brains.
Rather than argue that humans do not perform the same thing when put under the same conditions, I would argue that humans are so fine-tuned to changes in condition that there is effectively no way to replicate conditions in such a way as to elicit the same reaction. As an example, take the ruler lab we just did. Each successive time we repeated the activity, we had new information available to us, as well as different surroundings. We had the experience of how our partners had previously dropped the ruler, our fingers and the ruler were most certainly not in the exact same places, we were not thinking the same things each time, etc. In a machine, however, there is no collection of previous information (at least not yet). Machines are always in the same state, and thus always produce the same action.
Because of this, I would argue that humans cannot be considered machines, but for a different reason. While the others in this thread seem to agree that humans will not perform the same action when put in the same circumstances, I posit that it is effectively impossible to put humans in the same circumstances due to our sensitivities and ability to learn. If it were possible to put someone in the exact same situation twice (by replicating all previous thoughts, realizations, actions, knowledge, temperature, humidity, energy level, muscle use, wakefulness, etc.), then I would believe that that person would react in the exact same way as he or she did the first time. The problem is that such a situation cannot truly be replicated, so even when a situation may appear to be the same, it actually isn't. Thus, the human will probably act differently, and cannot be considered a machine.
