Dunlap Dilemma

Cast up the balance of your life. On one side of the ledger put all your past pleasures, all the hard-won triumphs and unexpected windfalls, all the satisfactions, material, mental, emotional. On the other side itemize every trouble, setback and sorrow, all the pain, frustration, deprivation and boredom. Now add up your columns and prepare to make an immediate choice of two alternatives:

1) To be totally annihilated.

2) To begin your life over again, live it up to the present exactly as it was lived before, without profiting by any experience of the first life.

Confronted with this dilemma, most adults would choose annihilation--according to Dr. Knight Dunlap, distinguished Johns Hopkins psychologist. Somewhat dubious of this conclusion was one of Dr. Dunlap's distinguished colleagues, Dr. Frederic Lyman Wells of Harvard Medical School, head psychologist of Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Dr. Wells and his associates presented the Dunlap Dilemma on cards to 176 persons. In Science last week Dr. Wells reported that only one in six of his subjects voted for annihilation.

This average held for Dr. Wells's largest and most important group, 121 subjects chosen for high intelligence among the hospital and university personnel, almost all between 20 and 40 years old. Of these only 20 voted against repeating their lives. A bevy of student nurses showed even stronger repugnance to annihilation, only four out of 32 voting for it.

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