Had the subject matter been subatomic particles, rather than football, I’m sure Mlodinow would have paid closer attention. As it it, I think he embarrassed himself on this one, though no one seems to have noticed. “Biased interpretations of ambiguous events are at the heart of some of our most heated arguments,” he says on p. 204. Nothing to argue with there. But he goes on at length to say:

In the 1950s a pair of psychology professors, one from Princeton, the other from Dartmouth decided to see if even a year after the event Princeton and Dartmouth students would be capable of objectivity about an important football game. The game in question was a brutal match in which Dartmouth played especially rough but Princeton came out on top. The scientists showed showed a group of students from each school a film of the match and asked them to take note of every infraction they spotted specifying which were “flagrant” or “mild.” Princeton students saw the Dartmouth team commit more than twice as many infractions as their own team, while Dartmouth students contend about an equal number on both sides. Princeton viewers rated most of the Dartmouth fouls as flagrant but few of their own as such, whereas the Dartmouth viewers rated only a few of their own infractions as flagrant but half of Princeton’s. And when asked if Dartmouth was playing intentionally rough or dirty, the vast majority of the Princeton fans said “yes” while the vast majority of the Dartmouth fans who had a definite opinion said “no.” The researchers wrote, “The same sensory experiences emanating from the football field transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain … gave rise to different experiences in different people … There is no such ‘thing’ as a game existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’”

He then adds, “I like that last quote because although it was written about football, it seems to be true about the game of life in general.” “The same sensory experiences emanating from the football field transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain…” This is pseudoscientific bullshit for they watched a replay of the game. Had they watched the game without eyes or brains the results would have been very different. Fortunately, they had both. But the conclusion is the thing. “There is no such ‘thing’ as a game existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’” But there was never an effort on the part of the testers to find a neutral place or a neutral group to evaluate the game. They chose students from the opposing schools, young people with vested interests in the results. And they did this only one season after the infamous game. The Freshmen were now Sophomores. How much more maturity and impartiality should they expect? Not only were they students at the opposing schools, but as the paragraph goes on to say, they were Princeton and Dartmouth fans. They were anything but neutral.

And life is indeed a lot like that. People with vested interests tend to support those interests. When a jury is selected the attorneys asks the potential jurors if they know the defendant, if they have heard about him in the newspapers or other media, if they have formed an opinion about innocence or guilt. This is a normal attempt to eliminate jurors with vested interests. If that becomes a problem, the attorneys may ask for a change of venue. In other words, they can request that the trial be moved to a place where neutral jurors are more likely to be found.

If you want a valid evaluation of a game, whether the game is football or life, you need people removed from the actualities of the game, the school, the fans, to make that evaluation. Laplanders taught the rules of American Football could have done that. But that wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted to show that students of a particular school would support their school, and they wanted to suggest that that had something to do with their brains malfunctioning. They also wanted to dress it up in bullshit and publish it in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, which they did in issue 49 (1954), because that’s what academic psychologists do.

Mlodinov, a physicist, took it hook, line and sinker.