Of course, it’s possible that second answers aren’t inherently better they’re only better because students are generally so reluctant to switch that they only make changes when they’re fairly confident. I’ve seen it in my own classroom year after year: my students’ final exams have surprisingly few eraser marks, but those who do rethink their first answers rather than staying anchored to them end up improving their scores. Only a quarter of the changes were from right to wrong, while half were from wrong to right. In one demonstration, psychologists counted eraser marks on the exams of more than 1,500 students in Illinois. This phenomenon is known as the first‑instinct fallacy. When a trio of psychologists conducted a comprehensive review of thirty‑ three studies, they found that in every one, the majority of answer revisions were from wrong to right. With all due respect to the lessons of experience, I prefer the rigor of evidence. Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.” Kaplan, the big test‑prep company, once warned students to “exercise great caution if you decide to change an answer. You have some extra time-should you stick with your first instinct or change it?Ībout three quarters of students are convinced that revising their answer will hurt their score. Imagine that you’ve just finished taking a multiple-choice test, and you start to second‑guess one of your answers. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve-and the faster you can solve them. When people reflect on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence.
But Dodge prevailed because of his mental fitness. Why did only three of the smokejumpers survive? Physical fitness might have been a factor the other two survivors managed to outrun the fire and reach the crest of the ridge. A pocket watch belonging to one of the victims was later found with the hands melted at 5:56 p.m. Tragically, twelve of the smokejumpers perished. As the wildfire raged directly above him, he survived in the oxygen close to the ground. He then poured water from his canteen onto his handkerchief, covered his mouth with it, and lay facedown in the charred area for the next fifteen minutes. By burning the grass ahead of him, he cleared the area of fuel for the wildfire to feed on. What the smokejumpers didn’t realize was that Dodge had devised a survival strategy: he was building an escape fire. It’s no surprise that the crew didn’t follow Dodge when he waved his arms toward his fire and yelled, “Up! Up this way!” “With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us?” He thought to himself: That bastard Dodge is trying to burn me to death. “We thought he must have gone nuts,” one later recalled. He took out a matchbook, started lighting matches, and threw them into the grass. Instead of trying to outrun the fire, he stopped and bent over. With safety in sight but the fire swiftly advancing, Dodge did something that baffled his crew. Over the next eight minutes they traveled nearly 500 yards, leaving the top of the ridge less than 200 yards away. The smoke‑jumpers had to bolt up an extremely steep incline, through knee‑high grass on rocky terrain. Realizing it was time to shift gears from fight to flight, Dodge immediately turned the crew around to run back up the slope. it was clear that even containing the fire was off the table. Soon the fire would be blazing fast enough to cross the length of two football fields in less than a minute.īy 5:45 p.m.
The flames stretched as high as 30 feet in the air. Their plan was to dig a line in the soil around the fire to contain it and direct it toward an area where there wasn’t much to burn.Īfter hiking about a quarter mile, the foreman, Wagner Dodge, saw that the fire had leapt across the gulch and was heading straight at them. With the fire visible across the gulch, they made their way down the slope toward the Missouri River. The smokejumpers landed near the top of Mann Gulch late on a scorching August afternoon in 1949. In a matter of minutes, they would be racing for their lives. They were smokejumpers: elite wildland firefighters parachuting in to extinguish a forest fire started by lightning the day before. After a bumpy flight, fifteen men dropped from the Montana sky.
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