Think Again

CHAPTER 3
The Joy of Being Wrong
The Thrill of Not Believing Everything You Think
I have a degree from Harvard. Whenever I’m wrong, the world
makes a little less sense.
—
DR
. 
FRASIER
CRANE
, 
PLAYED
BY
KELSEY
GRAMMER
n the fall of 1959, a prominent psychologist welcomed new participants
into a wildly unethical study. He had handpicked a group of Harvard
sophomores to join a series of experiments that would run through the
rest of their time in college. The students volunteered to spend a couple of
hours a week contributing to knowledge about how personality develops
and how psychological problems can be solved. They had no idea that they
were actually signing up to have their beliefs attacked.
The researcher, Henry Murray, had originally trained as a physician and
biochemist. After becoming a distinguished psychologist, he was
disillusioned that his field paid little attention to how people navigate
difficult interactions, so he decided to create them in his own lab. He gave
students a month to write out their personal philosophy of life, including
their core values and guiding principles. When they showed up to submit
their work, they were paired with another student who had done the same
exercise. They would have a day or two to read each other’s philosophies,
and then they would be filmed debating them. The experience would be
much more intense than they anticipated.

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Murray modeled the study on psychological assessments he had
developed for spies in World War II. As a lieutenant colonel, Murray had
been recruited to vet potential agents for the Office of Strategic Services,
the precursor to the CIA. To gauge how candidates would handle pressure,
he sent them down to a basement to be interrogated with a bright light
shining in their faces. The examiner would wait for an inconsistency in their
accounts to pop up and then scream, “You’re a liar!” Some candidates quit
on the spot; others were reduced to tears. Those who withstood the
onslaught got the gig.
Now Murray was ready for a more systematic study of reactions to
stress. He had carefully screened students to create a sample that included a
wide range of personalities and mental health profiles. He gave them code
names based on their character traits, including Drill, Quartz, Locust,
Hinge, and Lawful—more on him later.
When students arrived for the debate, they discovered that their
sparring partner was not a peer but a law student. What they didn’t know
was that the law student was in cahoots with the research team: his task was
to spend eighteen minutes launching an aggressive assault on their
worldviews. Murray called it a “stressful interpersonal disputation,” having
directed the law student to make the participants angry and anxious with a
“mode of attack” that was “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.”
The poor students sweated and shouted as they struggled to defend their
ideals.
The pain didn’t stop there. In the weeks that followed, the students
were invited back to the lab to discuss the films of their own interactions.
They watched themselves grimacing and stringing together incoherent
sentences. All in all, they spent about eight hours reliving those humiliating
eighteen minutes. A quarter century later, when the participants reflected on
the experience, it was clear that many had found it agonizing. Drill
described feeling “unabating rage.” Locust recalled his bewilderment,
anger, chagrin, and discomfort. “They have deceived me, telling me there
was going to be a discussion, when in fact there was an attack,” he wrote.
“How could they have done this to me; what is the point of this?”
Other participants had a strikingly different response: they actually
seemed to get a kick out of being forced to rethink their beliefs. “Some may
have found the experience mildly discomforting, in that their cherished (and
in my case, at least, sophomoric) philosophies were challenged in an

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aggressive manner,” one participant remembers. “But it was hardly an
experience that would blight one for a week, let alone a life.” Another
described the whole series of events as “highly agreeable.” A third went so
far as to call it “fun.”
Ever since I first read about the participants who reacted
enthusiastically, I’ve been fascinated by what made them tick. How did they
manage to enjoy the experience of having their beliefs eviscerated—and
how can the rest of us learn to do the same?
Since the records of the study are still sealed and the vast majority of
the participants haven’t revealed their identities, I did the next best thing: I
went searching for people like them. I found a Nobel Prize–winning
scientist and two of the world’s top election forecasters. They aren’t just
comfortable being wrong; they actually seem to be thrilled by it. I think
they can teach us something about how to be more graceful and accepting
in moments when we discover that our beliefs might not be true. The goal is
not to be wrong more often. It’s to recognize that we’re all wrong more
often than we’d like to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole
we dig for ourselves.

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