HUMAN FALLIBILITY

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 July 1923, Page 6

HUMAN FALLIBILITY

A CURIOUS EXPERIMENT

Human fallibility was demonstrated in a remarkable manner by Professor Dlilton Schlagenhauf head of the department of psychology at the North-Eastern University, Boston, before a class of fifty advanced students of psychology. While a lecture was in progress two students engaged in a fight, secretly arranged by tiie professor without tiie knowledge of the rest of the class. Suddenly a shot was fired, and one student dropped to the floor, while the other fled. The class was in an uproar, but Professor Schlagenhauf quieted the students and told them to write immediately a description of what had occurred. As a matter of fact the shot was fired out of sight in an adjacent room by a concealed attendant, w’hile the student who was supposed to have fired it really had a banana in his hand. Nevertheless, forty-seven students insisted that they saw a revolver in the student’s hand, and some declared that, they saw the flash and the smoke. Descriptions of the dress of the two students varied widely, and versions of the Avords used by them during the “fight” before the shooting were equally incorrect. One student attempted to give the exact time, saying that he took out his watch for the purpose. He was an hour wrong, owing to his nervousness when glancing at the watch. Another student, gave the date of the shooting four days wrong. Professor Schlagenhauf staged the demonstration after taking his class to a court, where a witness swore that he could describe everything that, happened in three minutes during a burglary. The professor afterwards told his class that the witness would have needed to possess extraordinary mental powers to be able to do so. The members of the class disagreed, and accordingly the professor proved his point.