âIn 1949, a pair of Harvard psychologists recruited two dozen undergraduates for an experiment about perception. The experiment was simple: students were shown playing cards and asked to identify them as they flipped by. Most of the cards were perfectly ordinary, but a few had been doctored, so that the deck contained, among other oddities, a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. When the cards went by rapidly, the students tended to overlook the incongruities; they would, for example, assert that the red six of spades was a six of hearts, or call the black four of hearts a four of spades. When the cards went by more slowly, they struggled to make sense of that they were seeing. Confronted with a red spade, some said it looked âpurpleâ or âbrownâ or ârusty black.â Others were completely flummoxed. The symbols 'look reversed or something,â one observed. 'I canât make the suit out, whatever it is,â another exclaimed. 'I dontâ know what color it is now or whether itâs a spade or a heart. Iâm not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!â The psychologists wrote up their findings in a paper titled 'On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm.â Among those who found this paper intriguing was Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, the twentieth centuryâs most influential historian of science, the experiment was indeed paradigmatic: it revealed how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework: hearts, spades, clubs. Signs of mismatch are disregarded for as long as possible âthe red spade looks 'brownâ or 'rusty.â At the point the anomaly becomes simply too glaring, a crisis ensuesâwhat the psychologists dubbed the 'My God!â reaction. This pattern was, Kuhn argued in his seminal work, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,â so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of inquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. 'In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,â Kuhn wrote. But then, finally, someone came along who was willing to call a red spade a red spade. Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, 'paradigm shiftsâ took place.â
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