THE LAW OF BELIEF
A young man from a small town who graduated from high school with straight A’s. He then applied to the state university for admission. As part of the admissions procedure, he had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, like all the applicants to universities nationwide. A few weeks later, he received a letter from the admissions department informing him that he had scored in the 99th percentile on the test and he was accepted for the fall semester. He was happy to be accepted but there was one problem. He didn’t know about percentiles and he concluded mistakenly that the 99th percentile was his IQ score. He knew that the average IQ is 100 and he felt he could never do university-level work with his “limited” intelligence. For the entire fall semester he failed or nearly failed every course. Finally, his counselor called him in and asked him why he was doing so poorly. “Well,” he said, “you can’t blame me. I’ve only got a 99 IQ.” The counselor had the s