Shame on you
You FOOL ME SEVEN TIMES!
Last Thursday evening I watched a repeat of Monk on USA, and had solved the case in ten minutes. Admittedly, some small might not have had much trouble with it: only two suspects, Willie Nelson and an anonymous actor, were present, and it wasn't going to be the former. That and I didn't have a motive. All I had was how Adrian Monk would tell that the "blind" woman wasn't actually blind, and did the dirty deed. Of course, it's a TV mystery: you come in with the mindset that someone will be accused of the crime, but it will invariably turn out to be someone else, and you have forty-five minutes to figure out the truth. Real life isn't like that, and I spent a few minutes after the episode pondering that before I went to play Sumo Volleyball.
The next day, I reported to my scheduled psychology experiment; as a student in Psych 111, I'm required to volunteer for six hours of guinea pig work for the graduate students that need testees. The sign-up sheet only had one slot for the half-hour, filled, of course, by my name, so I was surprised to see three girls already present when I arrived, with their consent forms and pre-test surveys already filled out.
The test involved a word being displayed via an overhead projector; we had about thirty seconds to find an anagram of the word. Then starting, always, on the other side of the classroom from me, we would each in succession say whatever word we found, with the experimenter recording what we said on a tape recorder in the front of the room.
Something didn't sit right with me. More than one thing, actually. A lot of things. Why always start at that end, and allow the others, including me, to then copy her answer? Why did the girls always give the same answer...ALWAYS...and very often all say the wrong thing, with six-letter answers to five-letter words? Why when I spoke softer as test, knowing the recorder could not catch what I was saying but the proctor could, did he not object and ask me to speak louder? Why did the girls never seem to be thinking about the word for more than one second?