The Second-Biggest Lie I've Been Told

I've been experimented on a few times in my life, and I can identify the three major lies I've been told that have shaped my entire world view. This is one of those three lies:

The Greatest Lie

I love the 1997 PC game, StarCraft, and was playing it a lot in 2007. I was taking intro to psychology at the time, as well. Psych grad students used the undergrad intro classes as study participants (I think there were 1000+ people amongst the 14 or so classes/sections), as the course required us to participate in 10 of these experiments.

There was one advertised as a "video games study" and I signed up, because I'm simple like that. I arrived and was told that I, and two other male participants, would be playing games of StarCraft against computer-controlled AI for 15 minutes. They also told us that there would be 3 girls in a different room performing the same task, and our relative performance would be judged.

I played as hard as I could, and did pretty well, taking down 2 of the computer opponents within 15 minutes (well on my way to conquer the third). I had been practicing. We waited a few minutes for the girls to finish their game, and were told that both groups had done equally well. I wanted to meet these girls, because they sounded cool as hell to 18 year-old me. Maybe we could play StarCraft later?

The truth was there were no girls. The other two guys were "confederates" (the word psychologists use for lying fake "participants" who are actually running the study). The experiment was to see how men react when women are either worse, equal to, or better than them at something (StarCraft being the example here). I never learned the results. I hadn't even really thought that much about my responses to the questionnaire they'd had me fill out before revealing this unfathomable fabrication.

I went back to my dorm room and played StarCraft.