A project in the psychology lab gets torpedoed in a most weird and mysterious way.

How to overcome a research calamity with resilience and humility.

The lessons learned have positive, cascading effects lasting decades.

This column’s general theme is finding the extraordinary in everyday life. It’s not always easy, especially when bad things happen. But sometimes very bad things can become very good things in the most unexpected ways. To illustrate this point, I’ll recount an event from my undergraduate days that became a major learning moment in both my personal and professional lives. For better or worse, you’ll also get a glimpse at how research sausage can be made.

This was back when polygraphs had rows of ink pens drawing jiggly lines on slow-moving paper rolls. I’d just turned 21 and was running my first experiment, the most crucial part of my honors thesis project. I painstakingly ran one subject at a time. Each was nestled into a soft reclining chair with unobtrusive electrodes taped to their arms and hands to detect reactions to what they watched on TV. So far, I had data from about 20 of a planned 80 subjects. The results were looking great, with the polygraph lines jiggling pretty much as predicted.

That’s when it all came crashing down. I stared in horror at the output emerging from the polygraph. Actually, it looked perfectly normal, but that was the problem: I was running an equipment check, and no subject was in the chair.

What I was seeing........

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