This essay is closely based on an excerpt from Meyers’s Exploring Social Psychology; the excerpt is worth reading in its entirety.

Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic, said that the social sciences turn up “no ideas or conclusions that can’t be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations . . . Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behavior is pretty much what you’d expect.”

Of course, the “expectation” is all hindsight. (Hindsight bias: Subjects who know the actual answer to a question assign much higher probabilities they “would have” guessed for that answer, compared to subjects who must guess without knowing the answer.)

The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dismissed scientific studies of World War II soldiers’ experiences as “ponderous demonstrations” of common sense. For example:

Better educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems than less educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than street-smart people.)
Southern soldiers coped better with the hot South Sea Island climate than Northern soldiers. (Southerners are more accustomed to hot weather.)
White privates were more eager to be promoted to noncommissioned officers than Black privates. (Years of oppression take a toll on achievement motivation.)
Southern Blacks preferred Southern to Northern White officers. (Southern officers were more experienced and skilled in interacting with Blacks.)
As long as the fighting continued, soldiers were more eager to return home than after the war ended. (During the fighting, soldiers knew they were in mortal danger.)

How many of these findings do you think you could have predicted in advance? Three out of five? Four out of five? Are there any cases where you would have predicted the opposite—where your model takes a hit? Take a moment to think before continuing . . .

. . .

In this demonstration (from Paul Lazarsfeld by way of Meyers), all of the findings above are the opposite of what was actually found.¹ How many times did you think your model took a hit? How many times did you admit you would have been wrong? That’s how good your model really was. The measure of your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.

Unless, of course, I reversed the results again. What do you think?

Do your t...

Noticing Confusion