15 or younger.
Let’s confirm that this was a teacher asking you questions in a classroom situation…correct?
Were these questions related to school subject matter?
By not answering the questions were you somehow punished? or did the questioner just move on?
DId they ask other (presumably students) the same questions, looking for answers?
Did you know the questions in advance? or did you just know you were going to be asked 3 questions?
Does the subject matter of the questions (class) matter?
Teacher asking questions in a classroom, correct.
I believe every question asked was about something taught as school-subject matter.
Other students in the classroom could and did answer; I was in no way punished for not answering.
Didn’t know what questions would be asked; just how many.
All these decades later, I can’t even remember what the remaining two questions (or answers) were. The first one was a grammar question, but I’m not sure that’s relevant.
Were these questions being asked as part of a competitive quiz?
If so, was there a reason why you might not have wanted to win?
In trying to answer the one question wrong, were you just trying to be funny?
Yes.
No, I wanted to win.
In giving what I figured was the wrong answer, I wasn’t trying to be at all funny.
When they said you got it right, were they telling the truth? Lying? Mistaken? Joking?
For this competitive quiz that you were trying to win, was getting the first question wrong part of your strategy to gain an advantage and hopefully better chance of ultimately winning?
I’m thinking along the lines of a pitcher walking a strong batter to get another lesser batter and getting a strategically better position for the pitcher’s team to win.
Or a baseball fielder intentionally dropping a ball, so as to set up a double play..
Something like that,…you wanted to intentionally foul up the first question to somehow give you a future winning advantage.
As far as I could tell, they were blandly telling the truth.
So, you tried to get it wrong, but got it right by accident?
And they truthfully told you you were right?
Which was a surprise to you?
I’d really like to say ‘yes’ to this, but I knew that giving the correct answer would’ve been even more of an advantage than giving an incorrect one — so I gave an answer that I figured would be wrong, and was glad that it turned out to be right.
So, it was a lucky guess?
I expected to get it wrong. I would’ve been glad to get it wrong. I answered in a way that made it more likely that I’d give a ‘wrong’ answer than the ‘right’ one. By accident, I got it right, and got told I was right, which surprised the heck out of me.
Yeah, but I feel like that’s kind of selling it short; like I was just saying, I answered in a way that, as far as I can tell, made it more likely that I’d give an incorrect answer instead of the correct one. I wasn’t even hoping to luckily get it right; I was expecting, and would’ve been delighted, to get it wrong.
Were you trying to get it wrong to make it more challenging to you? Were you pretty confident that you would be able to answer the questions correctly that you wanted to get one wrong just to make it more of interesting to you?
Or maybe you wanted to get it wrong out of altruism? By getting it wrong, someone else would benefit from your wrong answer?
I was trying my best to win.
Hm, I’m stumped for the moment, but I have been on the other end of an interaction much like this. It was a physics class, and the question was what would happen if a particular equation had a plus sign instead of a minus sign. One student frivolously answered “the Universe would blow up”, and I congratulated him on his right answer (much to his surprise).
You were trying your best to win by answering the question wrong; even though answering the question correctly would have given you more advantage? This is hard for me to reconcile.
Did you know at the time you answered that a correct answer gave you more advantage of winning? or did that recognition come later?
By getting it wrong, would you have been able to validate something else like the teacher was wrong on something? I’m thinking the teacher (or someone) told you something you didn’t believe, so you intended to answer it incorrectly to make a logical argument that the teacher was wrong. But since you were right (according to the teacher) your plans were foiled.
Yup, that’s where the laterality comes in!
Oh, I knew — at the time — that giving a correct answer would give me a better advantage of winning.
Literally my only goal, in giving that answer, was getting the win.
Was this a team game? If yes, would giving the wrong answer have helped one of your teammates? Did your decision not to answer any more questions help your teammates?
Were you trying not to appear too smart?
Were the subsequent questions connected to the first one?
Would knowing the subject matter of the questions help? If yes: spelling? Other language arts? Math? Science? Geography? History?
Was this a team competition?
Were you competing directly against another person/team?
Did you want your answer to impact your competition?