These allegations about Mead have been repeated so often that they have become conventional wisdom. Martin Gardner, the noted science watcher, found Freeman’s hoaxing argument “irrefutable.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, biologist Richard Dawkins, evolutionary psychologist David Buss, science writer Matt Ridley, classicist Mary Lefkowitz, and many other intelligent people have endorsed the idea that Mead was hoaxed and have deplored her naïvité. Freeman stated the hoaxing argument so boldly and convincingly — after all, it was vouched for by the sworn testimony of one of the women who allegedly hoaxed Mead — that almost no one looked at the testimony itself. People thought the hoaxing argument was completely plausible and the evidence unassailable based on Freeman’s word.

In fact, the hoaxing argument is easily challenged using Freeman’s own unpublished interviews with the Samoan woman on whose testimony Freeman so heavily relied.