The “odd man hypothesis” was first advanced in Michael Crichton’s 1969 seminal techno-thriller novel The Andromeda Strain. Crichton presented it so convincingly that for decades afterward, I believed it to be an actual theory. However, according to Wikipedia, ‘The “odd-man hypothesis” is an entirely fictional construct stating that unmarried men are better able to execute the best, most dispassionate decisions in crises. In Crichton’s novel, the ‘odd-man’ hypothesis is explained by a page in a RAND Corporation report detailing the results of a test series wherein different people were to make command decisions in nuclear and biological wars and chemical crises.
Just to be sure, I searched RAND and found no connection to that hypothesis. (Now I’m just waiting for the D.C. “suits” to arrive here in a black SUV…) How did the odd-man hypothesis apply to me? Read on…