، In 1975, the dean of Stanford invited some undergraduate students to participate in a study on suicide. He was presented with a pair of suicide notes. In each pair, one was given a note that was in random writing, the other about a person who later took their own life. The students were then asked to differentiate between genuine and fake notes.
Some students had the intelligence to do this. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the original twenty-four times. While others discovered they were hopeless. He identified the real note in only ten cases. As is often the case with psychological evaluations, it was a complete setup. Although half of the notes were indeed real—they were obtained from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office—the scores were fictitious. Students who were almost always right were, on average, no smarter than those who were told they were mostly wrong.
The second phase of the study involved lying. The students were told that the point of the experiment was to gauge their response to whether they thought they were right or wrong. (This was also a hoax.) Finally, students were asked how many of the suicide notes they had correctly classified, and how many they thought the students would get correct. At this point, something interesting happened. Students in the high-scoring group believed that they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they had just been told, they had no reason to believe so. It was not, In contrast, those who were placed in the low-score group said they thought they performed significantly worse than the average student—a result that was equally unfounded. Once formed, the researchers observed carefully, “impressions are remarkably accurate.”
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A few years later, a new group of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were gives firefighter information packets, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bios noted that, among other things, he had a daughter and liked to scuba dive. George had a young son and He used to play golf. The packets also included answers to what the researchers called a risky-conservative choice test. There were two versions of the packet. Frank in one likened to good firefighters that he took precautions while others were found to be lousy as his supervisors put him “on report” several times. Again, in the middle of the study, the students were informed that they were misled and that the information they had received was completely fictitious. Then the students stated their beliefs. What kind of attitude toward risk do they think a successful firefighter would have? Students who received the first packet thought they would avoid it. The other group of students thought he would embrace him. The researchers noted that “even after receiving evidence that completely contradicted their beliefs, people failed to make appropriate modifications to those beliefs.” In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” because the resulting information from the two data points was insufficient.
The Stanford studies became famous. The contention by a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies that people really can’t think straight, or analyze straight, was startling. It’s not much anymore. Thousands of subsequent experiments have illustrated this. As anyone who has followed research—or even picked up an occasional copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate with a clipboard The student can demonstrate that seemingly intelligent people are often unexpectedly unintelligent. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we get this way?
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