Bernie Ebbers might be a free man today if he had known about Mark Ashcroft’s work before the WorldCom accounting fraud trial. Ashcroft, a psychologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has concluded that "math anxiety—feelings of dread and fear and avoiding math—can sap the brain’s limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems," according to Reuters. Ebbers pinned his defense on the claim that he really didn’t understand his own company’s numbers—a widely mocked claim that the jury didn’t buy. After all, Ebbers had risen to the top of what was once a multibillion dollar company. The idiot defense rang false. But math anxiety is something most nonmathematicians can comprehend. A high-powered CEO will have a harder time convincing jurors that he is stupid than persuading them that he is just too jittery to do long division.—Jeffrey Kanige
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