Evil Dolphin
Maybe because their smiling face, we have a perception that dolphins are friendly animals. Most of us heard the story of benevolent dolphins before, how dolphins have rescued some sailors by gentling pushed them toward the shore. Is it true that dolphins can really perceive a person is in distress and come quickly to rescue? It must be true, because no one has ever heard any contradictory story, such as some evil dolphins pushed people AWAY from the shore and caused the drowning of poor sailors.
However, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson pointed out that the seemingly reasonable belief about benevolent dolphins might be an illusion because, by default, people who have drowned cannot come back to tell us the horrible story of evil dolphins. This shows the danger of listening only to one side of a story.
Whenever I am in Taiwan, I watch a lot of Japanese cable TV. Some of the programs are really funny. One day, I saw a program about losing body weight. The program invited several ladies who have successfully lost a significant amount of weight to share their experience with the audience. They have used a variety of ‘innovative’ methods. One that caught my eye is a lady said, by applying a clip to the palms, she was able to lose many pounds of weight in no time. I almost tried the ‘clipping your fat away’ method. But before I ran out to buy the clips, I stopped myself. I thought, hmm, wait a minute, this sounds very much like the story of benevolent dolphin. It is more than possible that many more people have tried the clipping method but didn’t lose anything except their face. We never heard their experience because the program only asked for successful story!
This is the reason why a control group is so important in an experiment to find out whether an intervention is really effective. It is too bad that almost everyone, including myself, has very weak defense against this type of magic fix. For me, the cost is only one clip and few days’ ache of my palms, but for some patients, it might mean life or death, and for some nations, it could be war or peace.
I agree totally with you that most people are weak against “magic fix”. I think most of the stuff we saw on TV commercial is like that, they are never going to show the “other side” to potential buyers~~ XD yay for research and statistics~
Indeed. The foundation of statistics is probability, which gives us a healthy dose of skepticism and presumably prevented us from ourselves because very often we just want to believe the magic fix. How many “magic fix” we have in our house? Let me see, we have the ’shaking belt’ that is suppose to shake away the fat, the magic gel that claims to ‘iron out’ the wrinkles, the bee gel that can fix all my illnesses …
“Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.” We can change ‘justice’ to politics, science, or economics and still fit the sentence very well. By keeping the doubt and continuing to test it with statistics, we might be able to gradually approach the truth. Or at least, we might still have the money we spent to buy magic fix from the home shopping TV programs.
Great, thanks was just looking for this info for a project I am working on. Much kudos.