We Asked 900 Strangers To Draw It. They Made The Same Mistake.

CHICAGO — Draw the Monopoly man from memory. Do not look him up.

Seventy-eight per cent of nine hundred people gave him a monocle. He has never had one. He does not have one now and did not in any edition since 1936.

The people who drew it had never met each other.

What we did

We pre-registered everything on 4 March, before recruiting a single person: which five icons, the control, how a drawing would be scored, and who would do the statistics. We did not amend it.

Participants were shown nothing. No reference image, no multiple choice, no list. A blank box and an instruction to draw.

Then a control: a clock face. Errors on the clock were random, scattered and unshared — 4 per cent agreement, which is what noise looks like.

That control is the difference between this piece and every other piece about the Mandela effect, and the outlet that reported our numbers as proof of a changed timeline did not mention it.

What was ruled out, and by whom

Professor Wilhelmina Bainbridge-Osei's group tested the obvious explanations before we ever ran ours.

Not looking properly: fails, because people get it wrong having seen the image thousands of times. Copying an erroneous version seen online: fails, because the effect appears in people who cannot have encountered one. Guessing: fails, and fails interestingly — participants are confident, and confidence goes with being wrong.

Four explanations, tested, gone.

The sentence she asked for in bold

She read our draft and asked to reply at length, because her field's findings get misused constantly. Her statement runs in full at the foot of this story and it contains the most useful thing in the piece:

That a thing is unexplained is an ordinary condition in science and not an invitation.

Every time this gets written about, somebody reads "scientists cannot explain it" and hears "scientists have ruled everything else out." Those are opposite sentences. Four things have been ruled out. There are a great many things.

The two who remember the film

We interviewed two people who remember a 1990s film in which a comedian plays a genie. There is no such film. There is a different film, two years later, in which a basketball player plays a genie.

Both know it does not exist. Both looked, years ago, and found nothing. Neither has changed what they remember, and both were careful to say those are separate facts.

One of them described the video shop, the shelf, the position on the shelf, and the colour of the spine. Then he said: "And I know. I have known for eleven years. It is still on the shelf when I think about it."

Our correspondent asked whether that troubled him.

"Not any more," he said. "It taught me something about myself that I would not otherwise have believed, which is that I can be completely certain and completely wrong at the same time, and not feel any different. I think about that when I read the news."

What we got wrong

Our headline says nine hundred strangers. They are nine hundred people who take paid online surveys, which is a narrower and stranger population than the word implies, and our standards editor has flagged it in the box below rather than letting it pass.

The pre-registration says so. The headline does not. She is right.