We have fooled ourselves
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. But what if we told you that you have been fooled multiple times and you probably have not realised it yet? And who is to blame for all of this? Is it our family? Our friends? Ourselves? The answer to the question is society as a whole. What we are referring to are misconceptions and they are incorrect views based on faulty thinking or understanding. Isaac Newton discovering gravity by getting hit on the head by an apple is a classic example of a misconception. Also, having a bigger brain does not necessarily mean that you are smarter. Not getting these facts correctly will not have a huge impact on your life, but it proves how easy it is for us to take an incorrect piece of information and consider it the truth. More notably, our schools are also to blame as they have taught us “facts” that have been disproven years later. Now our group aims to spread awareness of misconceptions and to promote critical thinking.
The first idea that came to mind was to make a true-or-false quiz of misconceptions for people to take. We then formed our hypothesis why certain groups are more susceptible to misconceptions than others. As we were making our quiz, we quickly discovered that there were some cultural differences within the group. The group consisted of members from Iran, Sweden and Tanzania and we realised that all misconceptions were not suitable for each country. This led to us making a unique version for each of our home countries as this would allow country-specific questions. We also made an international quiz that was independent of what country the participants were from. If you are interested in taking any of the quizzes, it is still possible to do so by using the links below.
In the upcoming three blog posts in this series we are going to look at the results of these quizzes and present our findings. In the next blog post we will look at the importance of age. One could argue that the older generation has a harder time staying up-to-date as they are less familiar with modern technology and the internet. On the other hand, they have had more time to gather knowledge than the younger generation. Then we will compare different levels of education with hours spent on social media, regardless of age. Will social media prove more important than a high school diploma or are they just a distraction? Last but not least our last blog post will cover other interesting patterns and correlations found in our data. As we currently do not know what we will find in our results we kindly advise you to take any of our findings with a pinch of salt. There is a difference between correlation and causation after all!
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. But what if we told you that you have been fooled multiple times and you probably have not realised it yet? And who is to blame for all of this? Is it our family? Our friends? Ourselves? The answer to the question is…