David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

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    The tragic part was that Sacks loved science. As she talked about her abandonment of her first love, she mourned all the courses she would have loved to take but now never would—physiology, infectious disease, biology, math. In the summer after her sophomore year, she agonized over her decision: “When I was growing up, it was a subject of much pride to be able to say that, you know, ‘I’m a seven-year-old girl, and I love bugs! And I want to study them, and I read up on them all the time, and I draw them in my sketchbook and label all the different parts of them and talk about where they live and what they do.’ Later it was ‘I am so interested in people and how the human body works, and isn’t this amazing?’ There is definitely a sort of pride that goes along with ‘I am a science girl,’ and it’s almost shameful for me to leave that behind and say, ‘Oh, well, I am going to do something easier because I can’t take the heat.’ For a while, that is the only way I was looking at it, like I have completely failed. This has been my goal and I can’t do it.”
    And it shouldn’t have mattered how Sacks did in organic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an organic chemist. It was just a course. Lots of people find organic chemistry impossible. It’s not uncommon for premed students to take organic chemistry over the summer at another college just to give themselves a full semester of practice. What’s more, Sacks was taking organic chemistry at an extraordinarily competitive and academically rigorous university. If you were to rank all the students in the world who are taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably be in the 99th percentile.
    But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner.”

5.
    Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts.
    But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps.
    On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so you weren’t that unhappy.
    “Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system.”
    Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the