The De-Textbook

by Cracked. com

  THE TRUTH: You’re not “strong,” or “centered,” just lucky.

  Actually, only one of those things we mentioned was true (the fire truck part, obviously). It turns out that the narcissists on reality TV can tell us a lot about ourselves, thanks to something called the fundamental attribution error: a universal thought process that says that when other people screw up, it’s because they’re stupid or evil, but when we screw up, it’s totally circumstantial. The process feels so obvious when explained: We simply lack information about the context in which the other person screwed up, so we fill it in with our own. If we’ve never been fat, then we assume that the fat guy feels the exact same level of hunger as we do, that his upbringing was the same, and that the spare time and energy he can devote to exercise is the same as ours. In other words, we think that both of us faced the exact same fork in the road and only one of us chose to eat churros until they passed out from churrosis. The reality is, of course, that you were on completely different roads the whole time—a stress-eating pothole, a thyroid speed bump, and a few wrong turns in Nachotown, and you could easily switch places.

  BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Fun fact! If you’re consistently making fundamental attribution errors when arguing with your significant other, that’s a good sign the relationship is dying. Listen for it the next time one of you forgets to do the dishes. If you forget, was it because you had a thousand other things on your mind? When she forgot, was it because she just doesn’t care enough about you? Enjoy being single!

  MORE TRUTH: You’re kind of a dick.

  In fact, Science has stepped in to measure, with precise instrumentation, exactly how bad we are at knowing where we rank on the spectrum of people who are worth a damn. A study at Cornell found, over the course of two experiments, that of the participants who said they would donate to a charity (80 percent), only half actually did, and those who donated gave only half as much as they previously said they would. But the amount of money donated in reality was extremely close to what the participants predicted others would contribute. In other words, we know people are awful, but we’re not just “people” in our minds—we all picture ourselves as members of an “elite moral minority” (hopefully with sweet decoder rings and secret handshakes to match).

  Another study presented two tasks—one easy, one hard—to participants. The catch being that the task they didn’t take went to somebody else. Most took the harder task when it was all theory, but if they knew they actually had to carry it out afterward, they took the easy task for themselves and pawned the hard one off on the other person . . . even if they were told that person was a ten-year-old girl.

  SO MUCH TRUTH: You’re racist.

  Sure, there are still some racists out there, but the rest of us are better than that. Once we elected Obama, everybody got to move to a place the media calls postracism America, where white guys get to sing songs about pumped-up kicks.

  Actually, chances are we are still way more racist than we think. There’s still something inside our brains that keeps us from living out United Colors of Benetton ads every day.

  One Italian scientist gathered a random group of people—not taken from a Klan rally or anything, just a normal bunch of wildly gesticulating Italians—and made them watch an excruciating video of a guy’s hand having a needle slooowly driven into the skin. As you can imagine, the subjects literally felt the pain in their own hands . . . as long as the hand on the screen was of the same race. The result was the same for the white and black participants—they couldn’t feel as much empathy for a member of another race.

  And you might say, “That’s not racism! That’s an involuntary response from seeing what could have been their own hand getting hurt!” Pipe down. That’s what the researchers thought, too, so they also included a purple hand. Subjects felt empathy toward it just fine. That’s right—the subjects couldn’t muster empathy for a fellow human of another race, but cringed at the thought of somebody hurting a fucking night elf.

  THE POINT AT WHICH ONE CAN NO LONGER HANDLE THE TRUTH: You have no idea what you look like.

  We all know people who think the world of themselves—the ones who assume that every creature with a vagina or penis is flirting with them. Even if they look like a catcher’s mitt somebody peed on and cast out to sea, you won’t convince them of that. They know they’re hot shit.

  But that’s not you, right? You’re realistic on a good day, insecure on days that end in “day.” But answer this: Have you ever deleted a picture of yourself immediately after taking it? Have you ever untagged yourself on Facebook, claiming the angle was weird or the lighting was bad or your upper arms were pregnant that day? Maybe that’s because the person you see in the mirror isn’t quite the person everyone else sees. And the version you’re seeing is amazing—and inaccurate. Science has proven it.

  Now, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the researchers didn’t just line up a bunch of people and say, “You think you’re good-looking? Get the fuck out of my lab, Sasquatch!” Instead, they showed subjects eleven versions of pictures of themselves. Some of the portraits had been drastically Photoshopped to make the person more attractive, and some to make the person less attractive. Only one was left unchanged. When asked to identify the unaltered picture, most subjects picked the prettiest version. As in, “Yes, that picture that was morphed with a model is me. I’m sure of it.”

  There’s something inside our brains that tells us to believe we’re prettier than the physical evidence suggests. You guys didn’t really think the camera added ten pounds, did you?

  GOD, TOO MUCH TRUTH! TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!: You think you have more free will than everyone else.

  At the very beginning of his crazy rant-filled downfall from a few years ago, Charlie Sheen went on the radio and gave this advice to fellow addict Lindsay Lohan: “Work on your impulse control. Just try to think things through a little bit before you do them.”

  Now, it’s easy to pass that off as just the hilarious pot/kettle/black ravings of a crazy person, but look closer: You have two people engaging in the exact same behaviors. In Sheen’s mind, Lohan lacks self-control, but he controls himself. He makes decisions about what he does (cocaine and hookers), while she just does things because of her addictions and personality flaws (cocaine and grand theft). When she participates in a drunken high-speed chase on a suspended license, it’s just her impulses controlling her like a puppeteer. He, on the other hand, is simply exercising his God-given free will when he does a suitcase of cocaine with porn stars for thirty-six hours.

  Laugh if you want, but Science says that bizarre double standard is at work in all of us.

  According to a study conducted by faculty at the Kellogg School of Management, most of us believe that we can resist temptations better than everyone else, and in fact, overestimating our impulse control might be the most important factor in creating an addict.

  For example, while watching the nicotine-saturated movie Coffee and Cigarettes, smokers were given the goal of refraining from smoking. The catch was that they got to choose where they could place an unlit cigarette during the movie: in another room, on a desk in the same room, in their hand, or in their mouth. Those who opted for higher temptation—the hand, the mouth—got a higher payout: it was like a Game of Thrones episode with way smaller stakes.

  Participants who thought they had a higher level of control—that is, the ones who were more likely to keep the cigarette in their hand—also gave in to temptation more often. The more confident you are in your own ability to resist temptation, the more likely you are to set yourself up for failure.

  Those researchers also found that, without consciously thinking it, we assume that our own future is a wide-open horizon of possibilities (“Where will I be in five years? Who knows.”), but we think the futures of the people around us are basically set (“Steve will definitely get a promotion; he’s really smart”; “Tammy is going to get pregnant; she’s a ho”). In other words, we’re the only ones whose
day-to-day choices actually matter.

  That’s something we’re naturally inclined to think, and if you don’t fight against it, you might just end up in jail, getting self-control advice from Charlie Sheen.

  8.C

  Highly Implausible Causes of Death

  You’re Spending Far Too Much of Your Life Worrying About

  Most of the things that your brain and the media tell you to run screaming from aren’t actually deadly, and in some cases can promote healthy bowel regularity.

  THE MYTH: You constantly hear about how safe air travel is, how rarely planes crash, and how you’re many times more likely to die in a car accident. All of that is true. But the reason we still get a bit nervous when strapping in for a flight is because we know that if the plane does go down, we are screwed.

  Everyone’s had that nightmare. The turbulence turns into free fall; the captain comes on the overhead speaker and announces that the engines are out; and you frantically start calling and texting everyone you know, praying to whatever God you suddenly believe in and stress-farting like there’s no tomorrow because, guess what, there isn’t one. Running out of fuel is a death sentence. You’re a goner.

  THE TRUTH: Out of the collective 53,487 people involved in plane crashes in the United States from 1983 to 2000, 51,207 survived.

  FIGURE 8.9 There was a great tearing, and the sky filled with John Grisham novels and half-empty cans of cranapple juice.

  That’s nearly a 96 percent survival rate. If you’re wondering how that’s possible, just look at Figure 8.9. That’s Aloha Airlines Flight 243, which had half of its fuselage ripped off in midair after an explosive decompression.

  But, as is often the case, the pilot successfully got it onto the ground in a way that did not cause it to erupt in a giant fireball. As a result, out of ninety-four people, only one person died on that flight (the one person who wasn’t strapped to her seat when the plane fell apart—hey, that’s why they have those seat belts!).

  FIGURE 8.10 “You can stop screaming ‘We’re fucked’ now, sir. We’ve landed.”

  It turns out that the same miracle of aviation that lets planes fly also lets them glide, so if you run out of fuel midair, it’s not like you’ll immediately nose-dive or beeline into the nearest mountain. Your plane will glide and your pilot, if he’s competent, will ease you down for a safe landing. Assuming your jet is up thirty or forty thousand feet in the air, you have about a hundred miles of gliding. Plenty of time to arrange for some kind of safe emergency landing. Belay those stress farts, passenger! You’ve still got a lot of living to do. And best of all, you don’t have to call your loved ones after all.

  Scorpions Are Mostly Harmless, Like the Small, Docile Plane Crashes of the Insect Kingdom

  THE MYTH: Scorpions are deadly creatures that can incapacitate a man in seconds. Even the most virile superman is not immune—why, a villain once tried to use one to kill James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever.

  THE TRUTH: There are more than a thousand species of scorpion, of which twenty-five to fifty have venom that is dangerous to humans.

  The odds of dying from a scorpion sting are 1 in 300 million. Your odds of dying by simply falling over in the shower are 1 in 65,000. In other words, even if you find a scorpion in your shower tomorrow morning, the shower stall itself is still the greater danger.

  Though they’re dangerous to children and other such tiny people, even the deadly scorpions only have an adult mortality rate around 1 percent. You’d need a whole suitcase full of scorpions and Bond to lie nice and still for you while they get their one hundred stings in to take him down. And if he’s being that cooperative, you could honestly just kill him with the suitcase.

  Even If a Scorpion Learns How to Shoot You with a Crossbow, You’ll Still Be Fine

  THE MYTH: The pointy crossbow projectiles are death with feathers.

  That’s why Legolas seemed to average one dead Orc per fired arrow in The Lord of the Rings.

  THE TRUTH: Arrows tend to stay in the wound, providing a nice plug to hold in all the blood.

  Ask any hunter who uses a bow, and he’ll tell you that it’s not uncommon to trail an animal for hours—even days—after it gets hit by an arrow, waiting for it to bleed out. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to get shot with an arrow, try to look on the bright side: At least your assailant was nice enough to simultaneously bandage the wound, even as they caused it.

  Bathing with a Live Toaster Is as Dangerous as Bathing with a Live Scorpion, Which Is to Say, Not Very Dangerous at All

  THE MYTH: A sinister point-of-view shot of two hands holding a radio or a toaster. The victim looks up, too late, and then the bread crisper of doom is tossed into the water. Cut to the rest of the cast, wondering why the lights have flickered, then back to our victim, now dead and smoking.

  THE TRUTH: Electricity is just a flow of electrons from someplace that has too many of them to someplace that really wants them (i.e., the ground). A person sitting in a tub usually doesn’t offer a decent path to the ground.

  While the drain may provide a nice path (all that copper pipe), in newer houses, with PVC pipe, there may not be a path at all. Not to mention that if you plunge a toaster into a bathtub, the first thing that’s going to happen is that the water will short out the circuit and trip the circuit breaker. So go ahead and make your gross, soggy bath-toast in peace, weirdo.

  If the Scorpion Tries to Blow Up Your Car’s Gas Tank with a Cigarette, All That Will Happen Is That He’ll Look Like an Asshole

  THE MYTH: Drop a cigarette into a pool of gas leading to the car with bad guys in it, then turn around and walk away. An explosion is so certain, you don’t even need to watch for it.

  THE TRUTH: Gasoline is really good at burning—that’s why it makes a good fuel. But getting it to explode takes real effort—that’s also why it makes a good fuel. Otherwise every backfire would turn your car into a tiny mushroom cloud.

  Plain old liquid gasoline doesn’t explode at all—you can drop lit matches into a bucket of gasoline in cold weather, and the matches will probably just go out. (Note: We said PROBABLY.)

  It’s the vapor you have to worry about—those tiny particles swirling in the air around it. To get an honest-to-goodness explosion takes a lot of vapor mixed with just the right amount of oxygen. Now, if you get a car burning, the fuel tank will eventually burst, and then maybe you’ll get a nice fireball as all the gas combusts. But more often than not, the fire will just burn steadily until all of the fuel (and the car) is gone. And then what are you left with? Just an empty book of matches, an empty heart, and a full arson charge. Maybe you should pick up a different hobby than burning cars to check for explosions; knitting seems nice.

  Sharks Are Pussies, and You Can Tell Them We Said So

  THE MYTH: Sharks are the grim reapers of the ocean.

  They’re so deadly, they even managed to take down Samuel L. Jackson that one time in Deep Blue Sea. (Although to be fair, his back was turned. Sneaky bastards.)

  THE TRUTH: On average, only one person in the United States dies from a shark attack each year.

  That’s a 1 in 3,748,067 chance in your lifetime. For every year that several people are killed by sharks, there are plenty of other years in which no one is. You want to know what bloodthirsty, murderous beast kills about twenty times as many people?

  Cows.

  Cows killed 108 people between 2003 and 2008, an average of about 22 deaths a year, or a 1 in 173,871 chance. That’s just counting straight goring and trampling, too—not even touching mad cow disease or E. coli.

  Because seriously, don’t touch that stuff; it’s full of E. coli.

  Snakes and Scorpions Are Racing to See Who Has the Less Deadly Poison and They’re Both Winning!

  THE MYTH: “I’ve just been bitten by a snake, but, hey, don’t even bother getting help, because I’m just gonna die.”

  “Snakes are the worst, and one bit me, so I’m fucked. Tell my friends I died doing something cooler than this,
and make sure I don’t leave a dumb-looking corpse behind, please.”

  FIGURE 8.11 They could have at least buried him.

  THE TRUTH: Between seven and eight thousand people in America receive venomous snakebites every year. Guess how many die.

  Five. Five.

  According to the National Center for Health Statistics, that’s fewer than the number of people killed by bites or stings from nonvenomous insects, which somehow kill seven people every year. Anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of snakebites are “dry bites,” or bites that don’t contain enough poison to even reach your bloodstream.

  You are far more likely to have your life saved by snake venom, since it’s been one of the most useful naturally occurring chemicals for medical researchers.

  8.D

  What Should Scare You Instead

  Way More Dangerous Than You Thought Possible

  Obviously the world isn’t all fuzzy bunnies and soft landing surfaces. Here are some easy-to-dismiss dangers that thrive on killing people who take their eye off the ball, just for a second.

  THE MYTH: Getting a regular physical exam is the healthiest thing you can do for your body

  It detects bad stuff before it gets out of hand, and it gives you the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’ll live another year.

  THE TRUTH: People who get regular physical exams die younger.

  It turns out the peace of mind is killing you. You should always go to see the doctor when your body tells you, “Hey, something’s wrong down here.” But scheduling physical checkups that adhere to an arbitrary date on the calendar has a tendency to interfere with your body’s internal alarm system. When symptoms of an actual disease do show up, people who get physicals are less likely to get those symptoms checked out. Instead they treat their clean bill of health like it’s a college diploma they earned. “There may be an awful smell coming from my rapidly blackening foot, but I aced my physical just last week, and nobody can take that away from me!”