The Quiz

We love our Dark and Stormy night writing contests, but the New Yorker points to a Bulwer or Dickens quiz that is a lot harder than it sounds:

Dickens and Bulwer were friends—Dickens named one of his sons Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens—and Dickens was Bulwer’s editor, and, although no one reads Bulwer any more, he was, in the nineteenth century, one of only a few English novelists to rival Dickens in sales. Bulwer’s been out of fashion since about the First World War and, lately, he’s so far out that, since 1982, the English Department at San Jose State has been holding an annual Edward Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, for the most dreadful first line of a novel, inspired by the sentence with which Bulwer began “Paul Clifford”:

    It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

In 2003, that contest inspired Mikhail Simkin, an electrical engineer at U.C.L.A., to post a quiz on a Web site called “Dickens or Bulwer?”

The Experiment

In The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, You Are Not So Smart brings up another scientific study that got a bit out of hand, involving two groups of boys at a campground:

Sherif noted the two groups spent a lot of time talking about how dumb and uncouth the other side was. They called them names, lots of names, and they seemed to be preoccupied every night with defining the essence of their enemies. Sherif was fascinated by this display. The two groups needed the other side to be inferior once the competition for limited resources became a factor, so they began defining them as such. It strengthened their identity to assume the identity of the enemy was a far cry from their own. Everything they learned about the other side became an example of how not to be, and if they did happen to see similarities they tended to be ignored.

It got worse, it often gets worse, and the Author expands that observation to other behavior:

In a political debate you feel like the other side just doesn’t get your point of view, and if they could only see things with your clarity, they would understand and fall naturally in line with what you believe. They must not understand, because if they did they wouldn’t think the things they think. By contrast, you believe you totally get their point of view and you reject it. You see it in all its detail and understand it for what it is – stupid. You don’t need to hear them elaborate. So, each side believes they understand the other side better than the other side understands both their opponents and themselves.

Again, so glad that couldn't happen here.