THE FOLLOWING EXPERIMENT took place in Brooklyn: sixty-two teenagers were assembled in a room. Labels an inch and a half high were stuck at random on each person’s forehead. The labels were all different, saying things like: “Lazy,” “Ugly,” “Famous,” “Rich,” “Cool,” “Clumsy,” “Wimpy,” etc. Each person could see everyone elses’ label but his or her own, and it was against the rules to tell someone what their label said. They were told to treat each other according to the label on their foreheads. Then they mingled. At the end of the experiment, one young man said, “I feel distrusted, like I’m some kind of thief. I don’t like it.” The label on his forehead read, “Dishonest.” As you might expect, the people wearing the labels “Rich” and “Famous” enjoyed the way people treated them. The participants could tell, just by the way people treated them, what their label said—maybe not the exact words, but the general idea was pretty clear to each of them. This illustrates something very useful.