Francis Akal

How to overcome your mistakes

Over 400 people were recruited for a 2019 study in order to learn a strange, made-up language. People were questioned concerning three rune pairs; for instance, which of these two characters is an animal? Following a short intermission, students were asked the same rune pairs with questions reversed, i.e., which of these two runes denotes a non-living object? There was a secret to this game, though: the meanings of the runes in round two were predetermined by the subjects' responses in round one.