I came across an interesting article, published in the New York Times on
June 11, 1950, that discusses a series of experiments examining how likely it is that college students will bluff their way through exams. For instance, when Professor Samuel Fernberger, of the University of Pennsylvania, gave his students their final exam, in one of the questions he asked them to define "psychoterminality." It was a meaningless term, but the students didn't know that. According to the NY Times:
Only two students honestly stated they did not know what the term meant. Six left the question blank. But the other twenty-one handed in expositions, ranging from one-half to three pages long, in which they solemnly described it as, among other things, "automatism," "vitalism," "hypnosis" and the "behavior of the lower animals." It was astonishing because, of course, Dr. Fernberger had just coined this mythical word for the occasion.
Professors Ernst F. Thelin and Paul C. Scott of the University of Cincinnati conducted the most thorough investigation of bluffing. They gave 147 college students a test that included numerous trick questions. For instance, they asked the students to indicate the authors of nonexistent books or to define made-up words:
Bluffing was defined by the investigators as "pretending to have greater knowledge than is actually possessed." Some bluffing was done by all students, varying from 5 to 81 per cent. Freshmen bluffed most; seniors least. The average bluffing score of the men (45.8 per cent) was slightly higher than that of the women (43.4 per cent).
Finally the article refers to a study that examined other members of society. An investigator visited bakery shops and asked for "scroofles":
Instead of saying they'd never heard of this mythical product... a surprising number of bakers bluffed they were just out of 'scroofles,' or were not baking 'scroofles' currently because of the lack of demand.
My hunch is that all the figures for the prevalence of bluffing would be even higher today than they were in 1950. But today we'd be more likely to call it
bullshitting than
bluffing.
Comments
The looks on the faces of my fellow students were priceless as they wracked their brains, trying to recall any reference to Sacher tortes.
I knew that the priest was something of a joker, so I didn't panic and wrote "From the use of the word 'torte,' I'm guessing it's a kind of pastry."
I was correct, but I suspect the question caused much consternation around the room.
"Maybe the experiment would be better with a type of test where you lose additional marks for giving the wrong answer."
The problem with that is that announcing it would tip off the test-takers that there was going to be a trick question on the test. That would cause them to be on their guard, meaning they wouldn't attempt to bluff an answer, screwing up the experiment.
"If you don't know the answer, write something that sounds like a lawyer."
"If you don't know the rule, make one up."
"If you're feeling really ambitious, make an exception to your own rule."
Now that I think about it... This probably isn't the best advertisement for new lawyers...
As to the bakery example, a "good" business practice I've often heard is to never tell the customer they can't have something if you can possibly get it for them. While I would personally try to get more information, I can understand why others may take the shorter route in the example.
To truly measure "bluffing" as defined here, you have to remove other reasonable incentives. None of these studies did that.
Which raises the central problem with these experiments, i.e., is guessing the same as bluffing? We probably wouldn't call right guesses bluffs, we'd call them lucky guesses or something similar (or perhaps just "knowing the answer"). So why is a wrong guess necessarily a bluff?
With that kind of training, I would indeed fail a phony, badly designed 'test experiment' such as is described in this article.
So, why wouldn't I guess at an answer? It would be silly not to. What have I got to lose?
In order to test bluffing in a way that means something, the test would either have to penalize you for incorrect answers or it would have to have no penalities whether you answer the questions correctly or not. There surely is a way to find out what percentage of people will admit "Gee, I don't know" and what percentage would rather bluff, but this ain't it.
"A 'Sachertorte' is a real kind of cake."
It sure is. I wasn't exactly sure of that when I wrote my answer (although "torte" was kind of a hint) so I guess I was bluffing in a way, huh?
I had a (really bad) paleoanthropology professor who invented a word on the first day, and declared that our goal as students was to decide on what that word meant. Our mid-term exam was simply to write an essay on what we'd decided the term should mean, and how we justified that meaning.
He failed every person in his class (aside from me for some reason, to whom he gave the lowest possible passing grade) and said that we all got the meaning wrong, that we obviously weren't serious about learning, that he couldn't see why we just couldn't understand, and so on.
I dropped that class that afternoon.
The test takers had nothing to lose, so it was logical for them to try to come up with an answer. But I think bluffing is a fair term for what they did. If they had simply selected randomly from a list of multiple-choice answers, that would be guessing. But they actually invented answers out of whole cloth -- answers they had to know were wrong. That seems like bluffing to me. They were pretending to know something they didn't.
But what I was really trying to say is that I just don't think the test, as described, is very meaningful. I, at least, don't see the value in discovering how many people sometimes make a guess/bluff/whatever when they are taking a test. That's pretty much all of us, after all.