‘What’s a common idea that science has already debunked, but people still believe?’ – 17 theories that should be confined to the dustbin of history

In this post-truth age, telling fact from fiction is harder than ever.

Even something as empirical as science isn’t as straightforward as you would like to think. Calm_Shame2994 clearly wanted to set the record straight on that front as they posed this question to the learned folks over at r/AskReddit:

‘What’s a common fact that science has already debunked, but people still believe in?’

How many of these top answers did you take at face value?

1.

‘That people eat several spiders a year in their sleep.’
-benaPanteraFBD

2.

‘Polygraphs as concrete evidence’
-Hairy-Economist683

3.

‘We only use 10% of our brains.’
-Fit_Razzmatazz_2998

4.

‘Lemmings commit suicide by jumping off a cliff’
-AdAccomplished6870

5.

‘Personality tests during hiring as a predictor for performance.’
-raznov1

6.

‘Running a fan on you at night can kill you (for older Koreans)’
-Wwdiner

7.

‘Myers-Briggs personality types. The two women who developed the system had zero background in psychology/behavioral health. One had a degree in agriculture and the other in political science.

‘All the research supporting the system is directly funded by the Myers-Briggs foundation. There is no third party research that supports their conclusions.’
-fileunderaction

8.

‘That people in the distant past only lived into their 30s. This was a statistic skewed by high childhood mortality – if you survived past childhood you were likely to live to what we would consider old age (65+).’
-ragtagkittycat

9.

‘Eating carrots will make you see better.

‘This was disinformation by the military in WWII to cover the fact that radar has been invented and could detect aircraft from far away. They wanted the Germans to believe we just had better eyesight.’
-cfiggis