Truth And Discomfort

A new study compares our psychological reactions to things that upend our accepted world-views. Participants responded to the simple moral of Aesop's fable about the tortoise and the hare in which perseverance wins the race, and then, in turn, to the more pessimistic take of Kafka's "An Imperial Message," a story in which no matter how hard one tries, one doesn't succeed:

When there's a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the...