Respondents agreed or disagreed to 556 statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgments concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle-class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply ingrained in the test— or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this is what allowed me to score as normal!”

Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m from Minnesota and I had to lie.”

More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.

Sax said, “The test made you lie.”

“What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”

“Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”

They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.

Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”

Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”

This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls? How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard.