Of Masks and Men, III

As a research assistant in grad school, I worked on a project that involved false beliefs.  For your reading pleasure/distress, here are a few more examples of poorly sourced impressions affecting daily life.

1.     The rule that eight glasses of water a day is the “healthy amount” is made up.

2.     The idea that you lose heat from your head chiefly has a poor scientific basis.

3.     Merely being exposed to something makes us view it more positively.

4.     The physical attractiveness of political candidates has been linked to their success in the polls.

5.     Labeling food “healthy” makes it taste worse.

And while you’ve probably made no decisions based upon these impressions, did you know that …

1.     Lemmings don’t actually engage in an annual death march into the sea?

2.     CPR doesn’t usually restart a stopped heart?  (But it can keep blood going to the heart and brain.)

3.     A bullet through the arm or leg is not—as movies usually portray—“just a flesh wound”; your limbs are so tightly packed with muscles that any injury to them will likely put that limb out of commission for the remainder of a fight at minimum.

4.     Vikings probably didn’t wear horned helmets except for religious rituals.

5.     Jell-O was nearly a bust when first marketed; it only became the big success it did after an adman dubbed it “America’s Favorite Desert.”

So if you’ve thought everyone used to love Jell-O, or drawn a Viking with a horned helmet; if you’ve forced down your 64 ounces of the wet stuff during a winter of ill-advised dieting, or found yourself talking about how ugly the opposing political candidate is … there’s a chance that you’ve let your impressions rule your reason.

Mind you, the opposing candidate probably is ugly, and water is certainly good for you, and hey, Jell-O used to be a lot more favorite than it was and, OK, Vikings did wear horns sometimes, we think, probably.  The point is not that these impressions are absolutely false, but rather that they oversimplify, and we human beings tend to rely on them even without realizing that we are doing so.