Fascinating Facts and Fallacies About You and Your World

By D. Keith Denton

Our world usually consists of us, our family, work, sleep and everything else in between. It is both what happens in between our ears and what happens between us and the outside world. We usually feel we have a pretty good grasp of reality. We can get comfortable knowing how the world works, but here is the rub, we can and do make bad choices and bad decisions that waste effort, time and money because what we assume is true is in fact not true. That is where this book comes in. A lot of what we hear others say, what you see when you look on television and read on the internet is often just opinion, not facts. Occasionally, what we think is just someone's opinion is in fact real. But more often it seems what you hear or read is all too often just made up.

This book is designed to provide truthful, useful and surprising information, not faulty assumptions or misleading statements. Bad information can produce bad decisions and wasted effort. So what you will find in this book is that every fact in the book is referenced. If you doubt the information you can check the source. If you doubt the source look it up yourself.So there you have it, within these pages you will find common fallacies and the facts that can help you make smarter personal, family and work decisions. But the book is not simply about getting better information. Sometimes it is just the experience of learning something new and surprising, things that make you say, Oh, my gosh can that be true? Yes, it is, that’s a fact!

Despite what many might think, all the following statements are false. If you doubt it, look inside the book:
• People on welfare are lazy and sit at home collecting money while the rest of us work to support them.
• Safe Sex is a more important issue to Americans than environmental issues. (it’s the opposite)
• The single biggest type of waste entering landfills is plastic ,paper or diapers (it’s food)
• The U.S. is losing is competitive edge in production of manufacturing goods. (no, we’re doing fine)
• China can hold the U.S. hostage over the debt we owe them.( they would be cutting their own throat)
On the other hand, there are also things about our world that may be hard to believe but are true.

The Truth is:
• Simply expecting a medicine to work will make it work, even if you know it's a fake medicine.
• Want to make a lot of money? Surprisingly, it is better to work for someone else than work for yourself.
• Undocumented immigrants contributed more - much more - to the national treasury last year than General Electric.
• About 55 percent of all Americans believe that humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs (half-jokingly referred to as the Fred Flintstone Factor).Science education anyone?
• Co-workers, with a nasty disposition, do affect your life expectancy.
• Obesity can be contagious. Viruses may actually cause some obesity.
• Allergy sufferers are far less likely to contract cancer than anyone else.
• Laughter can be used to help treat diabetes, stress, heart disease and a host of other ills.
• Want to know why kids act like they do? Parents spend 40 percent less time with their children than in 1965.
• The average woman can expect to spend more years caring for her mother than for her children.
• About 1 in 7 U.S. adults can't read, so I guess they wouldn't know this fact.
• One in five public school students is an immigrant
• 99.5 percent of all fresh water on Earth is in icecaps and glaciers.
• There are estimates that up to one-third of what Americans spend on medical care are unnecessary.

So take a look inside and learn some surprising facts about the world around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Keith Denton
• Release date: Feb 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310682551

D. Keith Denton

D. Keith Denton, Ph.D., is the author of fourteen books and over 190 management articles. He has written extensively about improving process inefficiencies and decision-making in both the service and manufacturing sectors. Many of his books have been translated into over a half-dozen languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Indian, Dutch, German and Korean. Over two dozen universities use his management simulations to teach graduate and undergraduate students how to better manage an organizationHe has also been international consultant and seminar leader in the United States, Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia. He has conducted numerous workforce management workshops and seminars in employee involvement and empowerment, team building, managing change, and customer service. Among his honors is inclusion in numerous editions of “Who’s Who in America.” and previously designated as a Distinguished Scholar of Management.He has provided consulting and workshops for, among others: J.B. Hunt Transport, Inc.; The Upjohn Company; Pacific Northwest Laboratories; Mobil Oil Corporation; Building and Land Development Division of Parks; The Durham Company; University of Michigan Medical Center; and Kraft General Foods among others.He participated as an international speaker for clients including Price-Waterhouse (Australia); Mobil Oil Australia, Ltd.; General Motors-Holden’s Automotive Ltd.; AT&T Network Systems (Great Britain); Peak Gold Mines Pty. Limited (Australia); London Air Traffic Control Centre (Great Britain); and the Ministry of Commerce, Energy and Resources (New Zealand). He has also conducted a management seminar for the top 100 governmental and business leaders in the Philippines.

Book preview

Facts About You or Someone Like You

Fallacy: Americans measure their own success by how much money they make!

Fact: According to the Roper Organization, its way down the list. The largest percentage (about 45 percent) of Americans defines success in terms of Being a good spouse and parent; 35 percent said being true to yourself was how they defined success. Being true to God comes out at about the same 35 percent. About 20 percent defined success as having friends who respect you. About 18 percent said being of use to society was a measure of success and another 18 percent said being knowledgeable was a measure of success. Fifteen percent said being wealthy was how they defined success, while having power, influence and being prominent rated even lower. (281)

Fallacy: Humans have five senses.

Fact: The actual number ranges from 9 to more than 20, depending on your definition. There is also sense balance and acceleration, sense of pain and among others a sense of time. (529)

Fallacy: Admitting your faults doesn't usually pay off.

Fact: According to research from social psychologist Fiona Lee it does pay off. She wanted to measure the effect of admitting faults. They used two fictitious company reports where one company listing their own strategic decisions as the main reason for their poor performance. The second company made excuses by listing exterior events as the main reason for poor performance (economic downturn and increased competition). Test subjects viewed the first company far more favorably than the second. Interestingly, Lee also found (after examining hundreds of these types of statements, over 14 real companies) that companies that admitted to faults also had higher stock prices the following year. The conclusion was that admittance to shortcomings in things like strategy showcased that the company was actually in control, despite their faults. Blaming outside occurrences that couldn't be controlled (even if true) often had the skeptics in the study viewing companies as not having the ability to fix the problem. (524) (521)

The Way We Think and Act

Fallacy: You can’t become what you think you are simply by believing it.

Fact: You can actually affect how you are and what happens to you simply by thinking about it. It is commonly called the self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP). A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that causes something to become true. You believe you are going to do poorly so you do. You think your relationship will fail so it does because you start creating actions that make it come true. You believe you are not creative so you stop acting creative. It sounds ridiculous but decades of research have shown it to be true. Self-fulfilling prophecy helps create behaviors that can be used for good or evil. Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Because a recession is 2 quarters of Gross the Domestic Product (GDP) decline, you cannot know you are in a recession until you are at least 6 months into one. Unfortunately, at the first sign of decreasing GDP, the media reports a possible recession, people panic and start a chain of events that actually cause a recession. (523)

A SFP must have the following ingredients:

1. Perceiver has expectations about how someone will behave.

2. Perceiver then behaves in a way that is likely to elicit the expected behavior.

3. Target indeed behaves in a way that confirms perceiver's expectations.

4. Perceiver (Objective Perceiver) sees predicted behavior.

Example: A coach expects his freshmen to be uncoordinated and unskilled so he does not play them often and when he does they are rusty and do not perform well.

NOT an example of SFP: You repeat I think I can, I think I can, and as a result you are able to make it. For more information see reference. (549)

Fallacy: Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

Fact: Those that studied it said the answer is no. (555)

Fallacy: If you make a bad decision, chances are you will try something new rather than put more effort into the same decision and hope it comes out different.

Fact: That would be logical but that is not the way our minds work We just tend to sink more money, effort and time into our previous decision and hope it comes out different. It is called escalation of commitment. It is the tendency for people to continue to support previously unsuccessful choices and efforts. The logical thing to do when faced with failure is to change your decision or do something different. You make a choice, sink a lot of money, time or effort into a personal or business relationship but it goes badly. The obvious decision is to simply cut your losses so to speak. Instead you keep hoping, sinking more time and effort into the failed venture, hoping again it will somehow change if you double up your efforts. It is a poor decision but one that we all do on a regular basis. (523)

So how do you get out of the negative cycle?

• Separate the initial decision-maker from the decision evaluator. Once you’ve made the initial choice you’re no longer in a neutral position to decide whether to keep investing in that course of action. Delegate the decision to someone who can take an unbiased look at the facts.

• Asking employees to explain their decision processes can encourage them to conduct a thorough, evenhanded analysis of the options.

• Research shows that if you consider the implications of the decision for others, you can make a more balanced assessment.

• Be careful about compliments. When we praise people it can go one of two ways. It can reduce escalation allowing people to feel good enough about themselves that they’re comfortable acknowledging a mistake. But it can also increase escalation by inflating the ego, causing people to become cocky: as if they couldn’t have made a mistake.(552)

Fallacy: Simply expecting a medicine to work will not make it work.

Fact: Yes, it will. It is called the Placebo effect where an ineffectual substance that is believed to have healing properties produces the desired effect. The Placebos are still a scientific mystery; we are not sure how it works only that it does. The mystery is that when a sugar pill is expected to cure an ailment, it often does. (523)

Fallacy: The Placebo effect just works on humans.

Fact: The Placebo Effect that we can essentially cure ourselves of maladies simply because we believe we are being cured of them. In other words we trick ourselves back into health. Turns out the Placebo effect also works with animals. Pharmaceutical companies employ the same double blind procedures on Dogs when testing K9 medication as they do for human medications. They use two groups—in this particular study all dogs with epilepsy—and give one group the medication and the other group a placebo. It turns out the Placebo phenomenon transcends the human/dog continuum because the placebo group reacted extremely positive to the drugs. Other famous cases where this effect is observed include; depression medications that seemingly work, however, several high profile studies show that placebos basically do the same thing, minus the adverse side effects. There were also studies where researchers found that those who believed they have been drinking vodka (which was actually simply tonic water and lime) had impaired judgment. They also did worse on simple tests and their IQ became lower. (530)

Fallacy: Americans and Europeans react the same to the Placebo effect.

Fact: Americans tend to exhibit hypochondria more so than anyone else on earth, but who can blame us with the constant bombardment of medication advertisements on TV and in print? We tend to assign a lot of power to drugs that can be injected into our veins. Europeans, on the other hand, react more positively to Placebo pills than injections. (530)

Fallacy: The Placebo effect only works when we don't know it is a fake drug.

Fact: Even when patients find out they are receiving a fake drug, it still functions effectively. That makes no sense at all but it is true. (530) Likewise, just as our expectations of a drug’s effectiveness can influence our reaction to a placebo, an expectation of negative side effects can cause us to experience them known as Nocebo.

Fallacy: Pill color has no effect on the pills effectiveness.

Fact: Researchers have learned that yellow placebo pills are the most effective at treating depression while red pills cause the patient to be more alert and awake. Green pills help ease anxiety while white pills soothe stomach issues such as ulcers. It has also been shown that fake surgeries can be just as effective as the real thing (530)

Fallacy: Stocks rise and fall based on supply and demand.

Fact: A huge factor is called herd mentality. It all comes down to emotion: namely uncertainty and fear. In other words, when folks feel like the economy is hunky-dory, stocks go up, and when people see or hear rumors about economic problems, it goes down.

Fallacy: We have the fortitude to stand by our own convictions during any situation.

Fact: Sometimes, but Herd mentality is a powerful tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict. Also known as Mob Mentality, this is, at its most common form, peer pressure. Herd mentality explains why fads get so popular. Clothes, cars, hobbies, styles, all it takes is a group of people who think something is cool, and it catches on. Other famous cases of the herd mentality or the tendency when most of us tend to follow the behaviors of others include: The Mountain Meadow Massacre, storming the field and tearing down the goalposts after football games, the Holocaust, Salem Witch Trials, Senator Joseph McCarthy hunting communist in the 1950’s and the of course the internet. (550)

Fallacy: People use only ten percent of their brains.

Fact: We use all of it, maybe not effectively but we use all of it. The 10 percent myth is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although it's true that at any given moment all of the brain's regions are not concurrently firing, brain researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body's muscles, most are continually active over a 24-hour period. Evidence shows over a day you use 100 percent of your brain. (530)

Fallacy: There is a man in the moon face on the moon.

Fact: No, it is called Pareidolia which our brains tendency to look for patterns where none exist and to believe random images or sounds are significant. Seeing images of Jesus in a piece of toast say more about the viewer's mental state than about the toast. The famous Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to tap into people’s mental states. Ambiguous pictures are used to analyze your hidden thoughts. (523)

Fallacy: There is very little difference between asking someone, Would you be willing to help by giving a donation? or asking, Would you be willing to help by giving a donation? Even a penny will help.

Fact: A small change can produce big differences. When the American Cancer Society went door to door and asked for donations in those slightly different versions. They noticed a 50 percent increase in donations by simply tagging on the phrase, Even a penny would help. Research concluded that people may be hesitant to take action when parameters are not set. They may have become paralyzed when not given an acceptable minimal amount. So defining ideal parameters (or minimums) can help people break through action paralysis. (524)

Fallacy: Believing that now the odds are in your favor now.

Fact: Unless you change the situation nothing changes. This faulty decision making is called the Gamblers Fallacy. A coin has a head and a tail. Odds are 50 percent you get one or the other. Just because there have been ten heads in a row does not put it is favor of now getting a tail on a toss. You're playing roulette and notice the last four spins have landed on black, so you are thinking it just has to be red this time right? No, nothing has changed. The probability of landing on red is still 47.37 percent (18 red spots divided by 38 total spots). It may sound obvious, but this bias has caused many a gambler to lose money thinking the probabilities have changed only to make another poor decision. (76).

Fallacy: We tend to remember about half of what we see and hear.

Fact: Not even close. On average, viewers who just watched and listened to the evening news could only recall 17.2 percent of the content when not cued, and the cued group never exceeded 25 percent. (617)

Fallacy: Our brains are capable of remembering a wide array of information at any one time.

Fact: A British scientist named Alan Baddeley conducted a series of studies on human memory and found that the correct number of things we can remember is 3 to 4 items for about 20 seconds. It then will disappear from our memory unless we repeat them over and over. Research scientists in the field of decision-making also tell us that people cannot choose effectively between more than 3 to 4 items at a time. (525)

Fallacy: People have an average attention span longer than a fish.

Fact: According to the Associated Press, the average attention span of a person in 2000 was 12 seconds, now it is 8 seconds. The average attention span of a gold fish is 9 seconds. (526)

Fallacy: Women can multi-task.

Fact: We humans can’t multi-task. Research has shown that we can perform only one cognitive task at a time. We can be reading or we can be typing. We can be reading or we can be talking. We can be reading or we can be listening but only one thing at a time. The one exception possible is to perform a physical task while you are doing a mental task. (525)

Fallacy: Memory is only stored in the brain.

Fact?: One of the potentially more mind blowing realities which it is that memory might, repeat might, also be stored throughout your body. There have been some amazing reports of organ transplant receivers claiming that they seem to have inherited the memory, experiences and emotions of their deceased donors, causing quirky changes in their personality. Cases were reported where food preferences and even sexual orientation have switched after an organ transplant. In one especially strange case the recipient of a heart from a murder victim led police to the killer. (527) The entire report can be read in the Journal of New Approaches to Medicine and Health. (528). Carl Sagan, once said extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So, not sure if this can be called a fact but it certainly is fascinating.

Fallacy: The main barriers to listening are the same for most situations.

Fact: Somewhat, if you’re hungry you have trouble listening but there are many differences. For instance, The top three reported listening barriers for business students were identified as 1)Personal disinterest in the topic, 2)Personal distractions, such as hunger, headache, or preoccupation with something else, and 3)Inattentiveness such as daydreaming. The top three reported listening barriers for business practitioners were identified as 1)Environmental distractions such as phones ringing and other people talking, 2) Personal distractions, such as hunger, headache, or preoccupation with something else, and 3)Rebuttal tendency – developing a counter argument while the speaker is still speaking. (618)

Fallacy: Most people won't hurt someone simply because they are told to do so.

Fact: Obedience to authority figures or people in power can really control our behaviors. In Stanley Milgram’s famous study, 63 percent of participants kept giving electric shock to another human being just because someone in authority was telling them to. (289). A test showed that people are willing to electrocute people to death if they are told to! The people being shocked were not actually being shocked; they were actors who had to respond as the voltage the participant thought he/she was administering increased. The actors screamed, cried, and begged for it to stop as the voltage increased. The participants of the experience were obviously uncomfortable with inflicting pain upon other human beings but continued to do so because the psychologist who was overseeing the experiment told them to. Sixty percent of participants inflicted the maximum dose. (139)

What We Do

Fallacy: People tend to tell more lies when texting than on the phone.

Fact: People actually lie most during phone conversations. In fact a Cornell University study found that 37 percent of college students phone conversations were telling lies. People tend to be more truthful in face to face conversations and when texting. (522).

Fallacy: The revenue generated from movies and recorded music is larger than gambling.

Fact: Surprisingly, the revenue generated from gambling is more than the COMBINED revenue from movies, cruise ships, recorded music, theme parks and spectator sports. (16)

Fallacy: American's spend more time socializing and communicating with friends, than watching TV.

Fact: Not even close. According to an American Time Use Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2012, Americans age 15 and older spend an average of 2.7 hours per day watching TV and 45 minutes socializing and communicating with friends. (534)

What We Know about Science

Fact: According to a report to the National Science Foundation (NSF), approximately two-thirds of the U.S. adult population could not read or comprehend a newspaper or magazine story about a current scientific or technological controversy. (338, pp. 7-8)

Fallacy: The U.S. average intelligence ranks in the top 5.

Fact: The U.S. ranks number 19th. The top 5 according to IQ and the Wealth of Nations was Hong Kong with an average I.Q. of 107. The other top ranking counties were South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. The U.S. came in 19th with an average I.Q. of 98. (269).

Common Misunderstandings

Fact: Although it is hard to believe, in the late 80's, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, only half of all Americans know that the earth moves around the sun, and only half of that group knows how long it takes. (295) (338, pp. 7-8) So has it changed much in all those years? The short answer is not much. This is amazing resistance to scientific fact considering ancient Copernicus (1473-1543) was an early proponent of this heliocentric model where the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system. Back then it all seemed counter-intuitive to the senses and also met with fierce resistance from religions which saw God’s chief creation as man so he would rightly be placed at the center of the universe. Even in the next century, when the father of science, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) used the newly invented refracting telescope to support Copernicus’ theory it caused him to be tried for blasphemy. He was ultimately forced to recant his beliefs and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

Fact: Studies funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that only 5 percent of American adults know basic scientific facts, and that this percentage changed little over a 30 year period. (414, p. 41)

Fact: The majority of the general public still knows a little but not a lot about science. For example, most Americans know that the Earth travels around the Sun and that light travels faster than sound. However, few know the definition of a molecule. In addition, most Americans are unfamiliar with the scientific process. (324) But even basic scientific facts evade many. The good news is we are not alone.

Fallacy: Both American's and Europeans know that the earth goes around the sun and not the sun around the earth

Fact: At last count about 35 percent of Europeans and 25 percent of Americans did not know this scientific fact. So at best only one in four Americans did not know this fact. (96) Furthermore, less than 60 percent of both American's and European's know it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun. (96)

Fact: Researchers again surveyed the population about their scientific and technical knowledge. According to that study, 55 percent believed that humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs (half-jokingly referred to as the Fred Flintstone Factor). Surprisingly one study showed that 15 percent of Americans did not know the oxygen we breathe comes from plants. Other studies have shown it is more like 10 percent not 15 percent of Americans and over 20 percent of Europeans did not understand this basic fact of life. (96) Still even ten percent is pretty large. In 2013, the U.S. had about 316 million people, which means about 31 million Americans did not understand a basic scientific fact that the oxygen we breathe to stay alive comes from plants.

As you will see this is not an isolated incident. In the same study, less than 1 percent of Americans who did not complete high school met the NSF's criteria for scientific literacy. But perhaps more surprisingly, is what are educated sector of society does not know.

Fact: Only 32 percent of those earning a graduate or professional degree were seen as scientifically literate. Overall, the NSF judged only 7 percent of Americans scientifically literate. (338, pp. 13-14) A recent survey also revealed that many judges did not possess the knowledge necessary to determine whether evidence presented as scientific was, in fact, scientific. (324)

Fallacy: Americans and Europeans know that it is the father's gene that determines the sex of the baby.

Fact: This time the U.S. scored higher with about 65 percent of Americans knowing this fact while only 50 percent of Europeans knew this scientific fact. (96)

Fact: Neither the U.S. survey nor the Europeans have shown much change in the public's level of knowledge about science, with one exception: the number of people who know that antibiotics do not kill viruses has been increasing. In 2001, for the first time, a majority (51 percent) of U.S. respondents answered this question correctly, up from 40 percent in 1995. In Europe, 40 percent of respondents answered the question correctly in 2001, compared with only 27 percent in 1992. The promising trend in knowledge about antibiotics and viruses suggests that a public health campaign to educate the public about the increasing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics has been working. (96)

Why Weather Acts Like It Does