A New Zealand man who was asked by scientists to agree with everything his wifesaid had to call off the experiment after 12 days because it was proved so harmful to hismental health.
    The study was set up to examine the old marriage advice about whether it's moreimportant to be happy or to be right. Couples therapists sometimes suggest that in abid to avoid constant arguments, spouses weigh up whether pressing the point is worththe misery of marital discord. The researchers, who are doctors and professors at theUniversity of Auckland, noticed that many of their patients were adding stress to theirlives by insisting on being right, even when it worked against their well-being.
    So they found a couple who were willing to record their quality of life on a scale of1 to 10. They told the man, who wanted to be happy more than right, about the purposeof the study and asked him to agree with every opinion and request his wife had withoutcomplaint, even when he profoundly didn't agree. The wife was not informed of thepurpose of the study and just asked to record her quality of life.
    Things went rapidly downhill for the couple. The man's quality-of-life scores fell,from 7 to 3, over the course of the experiment. The wife's scores rose modestly, from 8to 8.5, before she became hostile to the idea of recording the scores. Rather than causingharmony, the husband's agreeableness led to the wife becoming increasingly critical ofwhat he did and said (in the husband's opinion). After 12 days he broke down and thestudy was called off because of"severe adverse outcomes".
    The researchers concluded, shockingly, that humans need to be right andacknowledged as right, at least some of the time, to be happy. In politics, people oftennote that there can be no peace without justice, and that's true of the domestic sphere aswell. The researchers also noted that this was further proof that if given too much power,humans tend to "assume the alpha ( 首要的) position and, as with chimpanzees, theybecome very aggressive and dangerous."
    Obviously the results are to be taken with extreme caution, since this was just onecouple with who-knows-what underlying issues beforehand. But the study's chief author,Dr. Burce, maintains that the question of happiness vs. rightness, theoretically, couldbe settled by scientific inquiry with a wider sample. "This would include a randomizedcontrolled trial," he says. "However we would be reluctant to do the definitive studybecause of the concern about divorce or homicide ( 杀人 ) ."