How Children Succeed

played chess blindfolded against multiple opponents at once. Binet sought to understand the cognitive ability behind this unusual skill. His hypothesis was that masters of the blindfold game possessed photographic memories. They must have the ability, he thought, to capture a precise visual picture of what was on each board and to hold it in their memories. Binet began interviewing blindfold-chess players, and he quickly discovered that his theory was completely wrong. The players’ memories weren’t particularly visual at all. Instead, what they remembered were patterns, vectors, even moods —what Binet described as “a stirring world of sensations, images, movements, passions, and an ever changing panorama of states of consciousness.”

About fifty years later, in 1946, a Dutch psychologist named Adriaan de Groot picked up on Binet’s research and began testing the mental abilities of a collection of chess masters, and his results challenged another long-held belief about chess skill. It had always been assumed that an essential element of chess mastery was rapid calculation; that on each move, the best chess players were able to consider many more possible outcomes than novices were. In fact, de Groot found, a typical chess player with a rating of 2500 considered about the same number of moves as a typical player with a rating of 2000. What gave the higher-ranked players the advantage was that the moves they contemplated somehow turned out to be the right ones. Experience had given them the instincts to know intuitively which potential moves to take seriously; they never even considered the less promising options.

But if the best chess players don’t have better visual memories, and they don’t analyze potential outcomes more quickly, what does set them apart from novices? The answer may have more to do with their ability to perform one particular mental task that relies as much on psychological strengths as on cognitive ability: a task known as falsification.

In the early twentieth century, the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper wrote that the nature of scientific thought was such that one could never truly verify scientific theories; the only way to test the validity of any particular theory was to prove it wrong, a process he labeled falsification. This idea made its way into cognitive science with the observation that most people are actually quite bad at falsification—not just in science but in daily life. When testing a theory, however large or small, an individual doesn’t instinctively look for evidence that contradicts it; he looks for data that prove him right, a tendency known as confirmation bias. That tendency and the ability to overcome it turn out to be crucial elements in chess success.

In 1960, an English psychologist (and, as it happens, a chess enthusiast) named Peter Cathcart Wason came up with an ingenious experiment to demonstrate our natural tendency to confirm rather than disprove our own ideas. Subjects were told that they would be given a series of three numbers that followed a certain rule known only to the experimenter. Their assignment was to figure out what the rule was, which they could do by offering the experimenter other strings of three numbers and asking him whether or not these new strings met the rule.

The string of numbers the subjects were given was quite simple:

2-4-6.

Try it: What’s your first instinct about the rule governing these numbers? And what’s another string you might test with the experimenter in order to find out if your guess is right?

If you’re like most people, your first instinct is that the rule is “ascending even numbers” or “numbers increasing by two.” And so you guess something like

8-10-12.

And the experimenter says, “Yes! That string of numbers also meets the rule.” And your confidence rises. To confirm your brilliance, you test one more possibility, just as due diligence, something like:

20-22-24.

“Yes!” says the experimenter. Another surge of dopamine. And you proudly make your guess: “The rule is: even numbers, ascending in twos.”

“No!” says the experimenter.

It turns out that the rule is “any ascending numbers.” So 8-10-12 does fit the rule, it’s true, but so does 1-2-3. Or 4-23-512. The only way to win the game is to guess strings of numbers that would prove your beloved hypothesis wrong—and that is something each of us is constitutionally driven to avoid.

You may tell yourself that you’d never fall for such a trick; you’d be more careful. Perhaps, but if so, you’d be in the minority. In Wason’s study, only one in five participants was able to guess the correct rule. And the reason we’re all so bad at games like this is the tendency toward confirmation bias: It feels much better to find evidence that confirms what you believe to be true than to find evidence that falsifies what you believe to be true. Why go out in search of disappointment?

It turns out that confirmation bias is a big problem for chess players. Building on Wason’s findings, two researchers at the University of Dublin, Michelle Cowley and Ruth Byrne, interviewed two groups of chess players, all members of the Irish Chess Union: one group of experienced novices with ratings around 1500, and one group of experts whose ratings ranged from 2000 to 2500. They presented the players with midgame chess positions and asked them to choose the best next move—and while doing so, to speak into a tape recorder their thought processes: which moves they were considering, what they thought their opponents might do in response to each possible move, how they thought they might respond to each response—exactly the process that every good chess player employs at the board. Cowley and Byrne then used a chess-analysis program called Fritz to see how accurate each player’s analysis had been.

Unsurprisingly, the expert players analyzed their positions more accurately than the novices. What was surprising was how they were better. In a word, they were more pessimistic. When the novices found a move they liked, they tended to fall prey to confirmation bias, to see only the ways that it could lead to success, ignoring possible pitfalls; the Eeyore-like experts, by contrast, were more likely to see terrible outcomes lurking around every corner. They were able to falsify their hypotheses and thus avoid deadly traps.

When I asked Spiegel about the Dublin study, she said she agreed it was a good idea for a chess player to be a bit pessimistic about the outcome of any particular move. But when it comes to a person’s chess ability as a whole, she said, it was better to be optimistic. It’s like public speaking, she explained: if you’re not a bit overconfident when you step up to the microphone, you’re in trouble. Chess is inherently painful, she said. “No matter how good you get,” she told me, “you never stop making stupid, stupid mistakes that you want to kill yourself for.” And so part of getting good at chess is feeling confident that you have within yourself the power to win.

I saw this phenomenon in action on the day that I visited the Marshall Chess Club with Spiegel and her students. In the morning, before Yuri Lapshun lost to James Black, Lapshun played another IS 318 student, Shawn Swindell, a small-framed African American boy in the eighth grade who wore a diamond-stud earring and whose rating at the time was about 1950. When Shawn found out he’d been paired with a player rated more than five hundred points higher than him, he felt doomed. He was assigned the white pieces in the game, which gave him the slight advantage of moving first, and he later told me that his first thought was What a waste of having white. James Black, by contrast, entered into his game with Lapshun entirely convinced that he could beat an international master—a belief that might have seemed foolish and brash, but which turned out to be entirely true.

10. Sunday

Each player in Columbus played seven games—two on Friday, three on Saturday, and the final two on Sunday. As of Sunday morning, most of the kids on the IS 318 team hadn’t been outside the convention center since the tournament began. They just circled endlessly: the food court, the ballroom where the games were played, their hotel rooms, and the team room in Union B. No one seemed to miss the fresh air. On the scoreboard, IS 318 was comfortably ahead in K?8 and also ahead, though less comfortably, in K?9. James Black had won his first five games and then drew his sixth on Sunday morning. Going into the final round, the K?8 team seemed to be fairly certain to win the team trophy, and James was one of five players tied for first overall. If he won his last game, he could win the individual trophy, something that no player from IS 318 had ever done at junior high nationals.

The K?9 team had a bad Sunday-morning round. Justus lost, some what shockingly, and among the other