The Truth Box Experiment

Spend $50 at a dollar store to blow your students’ minds.

I dropped out of Georgetown University as a freshman at the age of 19 for complex reasons, but chief among them was intellectual boredom. I was double-majoring in English and Biology—writing and the sciences were my paired passions—but in both fields of study, the teaching seemed to be getting me nowhere I couldn’t get on my own.

It seemed a bad sign that the two most exhilarating experiences my first semester were when my Latin teacher read “Winnie the Pooh” to us in our language of study—delivering the story as forcefully as if he were a Roman orator-gladiator—and when my favorite English professor decided, at a wine and cheese thing with the Jesuits, to pin her nametag on me so she could escape while still being read as having attended the mandatory event.

“They’ll never know you’re not me,” she said, affixing her faculty badge to my shirt. I found her assumption hard to accept. She had dramatic red hair pulled into a long braid and a southern accent. I had a brunette bob and was from Long Giland. She was not 19. Still, turned out she was right.

After I dropped out, I took a job as a mortgage broker on Long Island, read a ton of books, and finally decided at age 22 to finish my degree at the SUNY down the street, Old Westbury, so that I could go on to law school and become a real estate lawyer or something. I quickly found the major I could finish the fastest—something called Comparative Humanities—which included a class called “Anatomy of Science,” taught by Jim Llana, an historian and philosopher of science.

In that class, Jim presented us with an exercise he called the Truth Box Experiment, and it so blew my mind that I wound up also getting a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science. Since having the pleasure of editing Musa al-Gharbi’s excellent contribution to the first issue of inquisitive, I’ve been thinking back to my twenty-something years of teaching Jim’s Truth Box, and the new year seems a good time to again share this brilliant pedagogical tool.

First, I should explain that in my teaching years, my students consisted largely of science undergrads (including many pre-med) and medical students. These were students who typically believed there was one right answer to each question and that they could figure it out. In other words, they were a joy, but typically naive about the nature of human cognition. So, very early in the semester, I would present them with Truth Boxes and run them through the “Experiment.”

At a dollar store, I purchased plain white, square gift boxes, about 6 inches on each side. I then put into each box one or more things. Then I ran four 12-inch bamboo barbecue skewers through each box at various angles, with each skewer poking out on two sides. Each box ended up looking a little different, because the skewers were never shot-through the same, box to box.

I can’t tell you what things I put in the boxes because my former students can’t know, but I tried to use things that would provide interesting haptic experiences. Some might feel squooshy; some might provide resistance. Some of the skewers poked straight through objects inside or ran right next to them.

After sealing the boxes, in class I broke the students into groups of three or four and explained that I was going to give each group a box, but that they could not open the box. Never, no way, no how, or they would fail the class.

They could shake the box, smell the box, remove the sticks, whatever; the only thing they could not do was to open the box or do anything that would cause the box contents to be visually revealed. Their job was to tell me, after eight minutes, what they thought was in the box, and why. I explained that developing good reasoning was very important.

After eight minutes, I took the boxes away and put them up on the front table. I then asked each group to send a rep up to the board to write down what they thought was in their box and the reasons for their answers.

We then sat together for a few minutes looking at the answers. They would often find similarities in their answers, but also some radical differences. Of course the students wanted to know what was really in their box, to which I responded I wasn’t going to tell them and that they would never know. This inevitably elicited a range of responses, mostly frustration.

The next step was to ask students what would increase their level of certainty about what was in the box. Soon, organically, they were reinventing modern science.

They suggested they could compare what they had experienced to what the other groups had—collaborating across teams to get more data and share ideas. They suggested that other people could examine their assumptions and conclusions to critique them: peer review. They noted I could reload the sticks and let them play with the box again: replication. The particularly clever ones proposed building boxes to try to replicate the effects: modeling.

What could throw somebody off as they tried to ascertain what’s in the box? When posed this question, students started thinking about all the forms of bias that could enter into the equation. Usually, someone would point out that the underlying assumption is that whatever was in the boxes was something already known to the students—that they had a name for and familiarity with the thing. But maybe they didn’t. Maybe it was something hitherto unknown to them, yet they had done the exercise assuming it would be something they had seen before.

Inevitably, after we went through this work, one or more students would ask me to now let them open the boxes or to tell them what was in them. No dice, I would reply. In real life, when you’re trying to figure out the truth about something interesting, rarely do you get to simply “open the box” or ask an authority figure (a sort of god) to tell you for real what’s in the box. Whether you’re trying to understand a complex phenomenon in physics or trying to ascertain what is causing a patient’s symptoms, you don’t get to just cut to the answer. There’s no “back of the book” answer key in most of life. And even when you think you have the right answer, you may be wrong.

Not every student was as thrilled by this epistemological exercise as I had been, but a remarkable number were. One student told me he was leaving the science-major track because of the experience; he had learned about himself that he didn’t have the patience to deal with complex truth approximations. (Fair enough.) But many said they felt weirdly empowered by the lesson, as if they had realized the possibilities of the universe and the human mind.

What thrilled me the most was how often they described not just empowerment but a new sense of intellectual humility. To this day, some of my students still jokingly ask me what was in their box, including a former student who now regularly opens up people. (She is the head of oncology surgery at a major V.A. hospital.)

Rarely does a fifty-dollar expenditure go so far in education. Rarely does a gift box with some barbecue skewers cause someone to abandon a career in real estate and go into academia. It’s a really good one, and I recommend it.

If you do decide to try this, let me suggest one thing you can do that I couldn’t: send the students home afterwards with the assignment to read Musa’s essay. And please, let me know how it goes. (But don’t bother asking me what was in my boxes.)

Just a couple of reminders:

Today (January 10) is the last day to submit a pitch for issue #3 of inquisitive. Learn more here.

Today also marks the start of the exciting three-day conference we are sponsoring, “Censorship in the Sciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” You can watch the presentations via Zoom. Learn more here.

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