A century ago this week Robert Peary and Frederick Cook locked
horns in the “The North Pole Controversy,” an epic media battle
that dominated news on both sides of the Atlantic for months.
For readers it became a scandalous and impossibly compelling
story, a post-Victorian Jon vs. Kate with furs and dogs. John
Tierney took up the story in the New York Times yesterday
morning. To Tierney’s credit, he avoids the temptation to spend
his entire column regaling the reader with evidence of Peary or
Cook’s rightful attainment of the Pole. (He does take a
position: neither man made it). Instead he takes an interesting
behavioral, rather than historical, approach to the question:
why do the supporters of both explorers defend their man against
all reasonable arguments? The answer, he argues, is that they
become psychologically (perhaps neurochemically) committed to
their candidate in a manner that is hard to alter. The use of
the word “candidate” here is intentional since Tierney reports
that this phenomenon is well m