Someone told a fellow called McArthur Mitchell in 1995 that spraying your face with lemon juice would make your face invisible. He walked into two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight and robbed them without making any attempt to hide his face. Mr Mitchell was arrested later that night only one hour after the surveillance tapes were taken from the banks cameras and released to the news, when he was shown the tapes he was shocked to see his face clearly and blurted out “But I wore the lemon juice”.
In 1871 Charles Darwin said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”, so this phenomenon has been known for a long time. Success and satisfaction often depend on knowledge and competence in whatever your field of endeavour is, whether it is academic or vocational, raising children or even just mounting a good argument.
Why do people fall for silly things that to a trained person would seem absurd, and would be dismissed in a second, but normal people fall for untruths every day?
Whenever you are engaged in a field of study you build up knowledge, competencies, as you progress further into the field, and if you are engaged in this field of study for a very long time you develop a lot of knowledge about your chosen field of study, and you quickly recognise truths from untruths, but what if you have never studied this field in depth? It is the competencies that you build over time that allows you to recognise incompetency and ignorance when you see it, without these skill you can fall victim to untruths.
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
This applies to health or any other area, and this is why so many people believe ridiculous things, things that to the expert could never be true.
Cheers
