POSTSCRIPT

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

In this book, we’ve surveyed the vast landscape of psychomythology and tried to persuade you to question your common sense when evaluating psychological claims. To accomplish this goal, we’ve focused on dispelling a wide array of mistaken beliefs about human behavior—beliefs that accord with our intuitions, but that are false. In the book’s closing pages, we wish to accomplish this goal in a different, but complementary, way, namely, by highlighting a sampling of psychological findings that violate our intuitions, but that are true.

As Carl Sagan (1979) noted, one of the best antidotes to pseudoscience is genuine science. As Sagan reminded us, scientific fact is often far stranger—and more fascinating—than is scientific fiction. Indeed, we suspect that most people would be less susceptible to the seductive influence of psychological myths if they were sufficiently aware of genuine psy chological knowledge. Such knowledge, as Sagan pointed out, fulfills our deep-seated needs for wonder, but has a decided advantage over mythology: It’s true.

So here, in no particular order, is our own list of 10 difficult to believe, but true, psychological findings (for compilations of other remarkable or surprising psychological findings, see Furnham, 1996; Stine, 1990; Wiseman, 2007). Many of these findings may strike us as myths because they are counterintuitive, even bizarre. Yet they are much better sup ported by scientific research than the 50 beliefs we’ve examined over the preceding pages. They remind us to doubt our common sense.

Ten Psychological Findings that Are Difficult to Believe, but True

(1) Our brains contain about 3 million miles of neural connections, that is, connections among brain cells (Conlan, 1999). If lined up next to each other, these connections would stretch to the moon and back about 12 times.

(2) Patients who’ve experienced strokes in their brain’s left frontal lobes, which result in severe language loss, are better at detecting lies than are people without brain damage (Etcoff, Ekman, Magee, & Frank, 2000). This may be because people who’ve lost language develop compensatory nonverbal skills that help them to spot deception in others.

(3) People with extreme forms of “anterograde amnesia,” a memory disorder marked by an inability to consciously recall new information, may repeatedly (even over many years) express catastrophic shock when told of the death of the same family member, and reread the same magazines dozens of times without remembering them (see p. 79). Yet they often exhibit “implicit” (unconscious) memory for certain events without being able to recall them consciously. For example, they may display a negative emotional reaction to a doctor who’s been rude to them even though they have no recollection of having ever met him (Shimamura, 1992).

(4) People with a rare condition called “synesthesia” experience cross- modal sensations, that is, those that cut across more than one sensory modality. They may hear specific sounds when they see certain colors, or experience specific smells when they hear certain sounds. Still others may see certain words, like book, in certain colors, like blue (Cytowic, 1993). Brain imaging research demonstrates that synesthetes (people with synesthesia) display activity in multiple brain areas; for example, sound-color synesthetes display activity in both their auditory and visual regions when they hear sounds.

(5) Psychologists have taught pigeons to distinguish paintings by Monet from those of Picasso, and musical compositions by Bach from those of Stravinsky (Watanabe, Sakamoto, & Wakita, 1995), offering further evidence that the term “bird brained” may actually be a compliment rather than an insult. Over the course of many trials, the birds receive rewards for correct answers, and gradually learn to detect cues in the art and music that allow them to distinguish one creative genius’ style from the other.

(6) People asked to hold a pencil with their teeth find cartoons funnier than do people asked to hold a pencil with their lips (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). If we think about it for a moment, we’ll realize that people asked to hold a pencil with their teeth are forming a facial expression close to a smile, whereas people asked to hold a pencil with their lips are forming a facial expression close to a frown. One explanation for this peculiar finding is the “facial feedback hypothesis”: the facial muscles feed back temperature information to our brains, which in turn influences our emotions (Zajonc, Murphy, & Inglehart, 1989). Interestingly, research shows that words that contain a “k” sound (which also make us smile when we say them)—like wacky, kooky, and quack —are especially likely to make us laugh (Wiseman, 2007).

(7) Research based on U.S. census reports suggests that an unusually large number of people live in places with names similar to their first names. For example, there are significantly more Georges living in Georgia than one would expect by chance, and the same holds for Louises living in Louisiana and Virginias living in Virginia (Pelham, Mirenberg, & Jones, 2002). This effect, which is small in magnitude, appears to result from people with certain names gravitating to places with similar names. This effect may reflect a form of “implicit egotism” in which people are drawn unconsciously to people, places, and things that resemble them.

(8) Compared with Dutch subjects asked to list the characteristics of trouble-making soccer fans, Dutch subjects asked to list the characteristics of professors later answered significantly more general knowledge questions derived from the game, Trivial Pursuit (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). These findings suggest that even subtle mental representations can exert more of an impact on our behavior than psychologists have traditionally assumed.

(9) People’s typical handshakes are revealing of their personality traits. For example, people with firm handshakes are more likely than other people to be extraverted and emotionally expressive, and less likely than other people to be shy and neurotic (Chaplin, Phillips, Brown, Clanton, & Stein, 2000). Among women, but not men, firm handshakes are predictive of the personality dimension of openness, which reflects intellectual curiosity and a willingness to seek out novel experiences.

(10) In isolated regions of some Asian countries, including Malaysia, China, and India, some people—usually males—are stricken periodically with a bizarre psychological condition called “koro.” Male victims of koro believe their penis and testicles are disappear ing; female victims often believe their breasts are disappearing. Koro is typically spread by contagion; in one area of India in 1982, government officials took to the streets with loudspeakers to reassure hysterical citizens that their genitals weren’t vanishing. These officials even measured male citizen’s penises with rulers to prove their fears unfounded (Bartholomew, 1994).

As a special treat for those readers whose appetite for unusual psy chological findings is still not whetted or who prefer their helpings as baker’s dozens, we close with three “Honorable Mentions”:

(11) Although our memories can be quite fallible in some circumstances (see Myths #11-13), they can be astonishingly accurate in others. One research team showed undergraduate subjects 2,560 photographs of various scenes and objects for only a few seconds each. Three days later, they showed these subjects each of the original photographs they’d seen paired with a new one, and asked them to pick out the originals. They were right 93% of the time (Standing, Conezio, & Haber, 1970).

(12) Some psychological research indicates that dogs resemble their owners. In one study, judges matched the faces of dog owners to their dogs at significantly better than chance levels, although this was true only of purebred, not mixed, breeds (Roy & Christenfeld, 2004).

(13) Holding a warm object can make us feel “warmer” toward other people. In a recent investigation, two researchers asked subjects to hold either a cup of warm coffee or a cup of iced coffee for a few seconds as a favor for someone, and later asked them to rate a fictitious person on a series of attributes. Those asked to hold the warm cup of coffee were significantly more likely than other subjects to rate that person as higher on “warm” personality traits, such as “generosity” and “caring” (Williams & Bargh, 2008).

Closing Thoughts: Taking Mythbusting with You

As much as we intend our book to be a guide to evaluating psychomytho-logy, we fervently hope it will serve as a lifelong guide to mythbusting in many other crucially important domains of your daily life, including medicine, the environment, politics, economics, and education. For example, the domain of medicine is rife with at least as many miscon ceptions as is psychology. Widespread beliefs that we need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy; reading in dim light can ruin our eyesight; hair and fingernails continue to grow after we die; shaving our hair makes it grow back faster; swimming less than 45 minutes after a meal can give us cramps; taking Vitamin C helps to prevent colds; we should feed a cold and starve a fever; cracking our knuckles causes arthritis; we lose most of our body heat through our heads; eating too many carrots makes our skin turn orange; and eating chocolate causes acne, have all been disconfirmed by medical research (O’Connor, 2007; Snyderman, 2008; Vreeman & Carroll, 2007, 2008; Wanjek, 2002). These popular but fallacious beliefs remind us that we need to take our mythbusting skills with us in evaluating all everyday life claims, not just those in psychology. Practicing and honing these skills can yield a useful payoff: better real-world decisions.

So as we bid you, the reader, adieu, we leave you with a few helpful summary pointers for taking mythbusting with you into everyday life:

• Although our first instincts and gut impressions may be helpful in “sizing up” people or in predicting our long-term emotional pre ferences, they’re typically inadequate when it comes to evaluating scientific claims about the world.
• Many beliefs spread by “word-of-mouth” are nothing more than urban legends, so we shouldn’t assume that widespread beliefs are accurate. We should be especially skeptical of any sentence that begins with “Everyone knows that … ”
• Media coverage is often misleading, and can lead us to over estimate the frequency of sensational events and underestimate the frequency of less sensational events. Also, the media often tends to oversimplify complex phenomena with the aim of telling a good story. But good stories aren’t always accurate stories.
• Biased samples can result in equally biased conclusions. If we’ reexposed primarily to one group of people (such as the mentally ill) in our line of work, our perceptions of the prevalence of certain traits in people at large will often be skewed.
• Certain biases, such as illusory correlation, confirmation bias, and the overuse of the representativeness and availability heuristics, can lead us to draw erroneous conclusions. Heuristics are helpful shortcuts and rules of thumb, but if we rely on them blindly and uncritically we’ll often make mistakes.
• Correlation isn’t causation, so a finding that two things are statistically associated doesn’t tell us what’s causing what. Also, merely because one thing comes before another doesn’t mean it causes it.
• Carefully conducted scientific research, although rarely foolproof, is an invaluable gift that we should never take for granted, because it’s our best safeguard against human error. As Albert Einstein reminded us, “all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have” (quoted in Shermer, 2002, p. 43).