Click on your choice of the links below to take one of the Museum of Hoaxes' gullibility tests:Science & nature test
History & culture test
Once you've taken one of the tests, create a post to report your score, then reflect on what the test and your performance have to say about the nature of knowledge, truth, belief, and/or justification (i.e. "good reasons," to use Abel's term).
13 comments:
I first took the science and nature test and got a score of 7/10. A lot of the beliefs in this test seemed really farfetched and pretty much impossible, for example how could those birds build a bridge without drowning before the others crossed? Also, some things that I thought seemed like common sense turned out to be untrue. I said false for the turtle question because I thought that everything will eventually die of old age, we've been taught that all creatures have a biological clock and their bodies cannot function after so long. A turtle cannot live forever and must eventually die of some sort of natural cause (if it is not eaten that is). If you put it in a logical perspective and the turtle does live to be really old but dies from some sort of sickness, than you can justifibly say it's dying from old age because it is dying from it's own bodies lack of cooperation to live longer. I think many of the ideas in this quiz would be easy to believe if there was evidence to support them. Some of the ideas I did believe because they cohere to my other beliefs but they were still wrong. Maybe this just shows why we are so gullible. If something connects with what we already know in the slightest bit then we are quick to believe it. On the other hand if something does not fit into our current beliefs, then we will not believe it. If I had evidence that pertained to my senses, like pictures or videos, than I would have believed everything. This is because pictures, videos, sounds, etc. give you solid reason to believe and when you percieve things with your senses it is real. Or so it seems.
i feel quite proud of myself i managed a 7 out of 10 without just googling all the answers. this test was fun its kinda funny the things we people believe just because someone said so years ago and it stuck. i was amazed that turtles have the chance of living forever. i had actually heard of it before but i always wrote it off as myth. after taking this test i think i might have to look into that further. this kindd of thing proves just how much we believe without actually researching anything. its like that test that we took in class on all those weird facts where only one was actually true. we believe way to many things simply because someone told us that it is true.
Well, I did better on the gullibility test than I did on the picture test which kind of suprised me. But then I started thinking about the different ways of knowing I had to use in order to answer the different types of tests. It seemed like the photo "evidence" made it harder to decipher between a hoax or truth. However, when I didn't have any pictures to rely on to use sight and perception I had to use logic and reason. In this case my logical sense and belief based on previous knowledge was more reliable than my sight. But then immediately my skepticism came into play and I felt skeptical of everything even though I was sure something was true or false. It's interesting how some ways of knowing are more reliable or we think they are, like sight, but then at other times other ways of knowing are better, like in this case my logic was more useful than my sight.
I got 6 out of 10 on the first science and nature quiz. I missed questions 5 (the turtles), 6 (Lemmings), 9 (frozen lightwaves), and 10 (gravity). The only one that confused me for a moment was question 6, the one about the lemmings. Last year, our biology teacher had us watch the Disney documentary about the lemmings, implying that it was a true phenomenon. However, after giving it some thought, our biology teacher from last year was proven wrong in many other instances as well, so it shouldn't be surprising that he's wrong about the lemmings. It was interesting that I automatically accepted the word of m teacher as truth, even when he had been proven as unreliable.
so the test people gave me 7 out of 10, but I don't see how that's possible when I got 4 of them wrong... anyway the ones I got wrong where either things that I had heard something about but had put the wrong answer down by mistake ( for example I know from Mythbusters that a duck's quack does echo, but I mistakenly put down the wrong answer) or ones that I had absolutly no idea about and just guessed. I think that the reason I got right the ones that I did was because I used a lot of logic in this test, because some of them I didn't have a clue about and I just went with what sounded logical. It may just be a personal thing, but when it comes down to it I think humans are very logical based on what the individual knows. This might be why some humans think that others are illogical: the others just don't know the same things that the one does or they think differently. So that would mean that logic and illogic are completley subjective.
Okay, so I'm actually a little bit confused about what we were supposed to do. I took a gullibility test from the site and scored a 9 out of 10 aka 90% were correctly answered. I can't really draw any conclusions from that because I answered the questions in the way that seemed the most correct to me and got them right by doing so. The one question that I got wrong was one that I wasn't sure about which answer I wanted to put for it. I didn't know any of the answers for sure and thus used intuition and common sense to determine which answer I would put for each question. I guess that the test is more than just a gullibility test though since I wasn't told at any point if any of those things were either true or false and thus when questioned here I didn't have any preconceived notions about what the answer should or shouldn't be. If I had some, then the probability of me getting more of them wrong would probably have been greater.
Hello there all (but currently only Currier). I scored a 5 out of 10 on the science and nature quiz. Some of these things seemed completely absurd and turned out to be true, others were absurd and false. I had never heard of most of these myths or facts, the ones I had I didn't score any better on. I used my used my logic, intuition, and memory to help discount or agree with the claims listed. My logic often took me away from the consensus gentium that seems to follow these claims.
I believe that this shows how what we often believe to be true due to what we have been told by our peers and sometimes teachers can often be askew, if not completely incorrect. We must try to use all of our sources and take them with a grain of salt at times in order to come to understand the truth.
I did the science and nature test and my score was 6 out of 10. For a few of the questions i really didnt have any idea, so I guessed on which answer i thought was more out of the ordinary. To get a good score you have to be both knowledgable about the event, but also have a good reasoning process to back that knowledge up. Some of the questions seem too weird or unreal to actually be true, but sometimes you have to think about it and realize that it could be possible and if you do not have and knowledge for it to be false or true, you have to use logic to choose and answer. You are then using the coherence theroy of truth.
I answered many of the questions off of my beliefs, and if I believed it to be true. If I believed it to be true or a pretty good chance of being true then that is how i answered it. Sometimes though, beliefs and previous knowlege on a subject can lead one in the wrong direction. For the lemmings question, the only knowledge of it is from seeing the video game of it as a kid and you are trying to save them from falling off a cliff and killing themself. So on the test I answered true because that is the only knowledge of it I had, so I beilived it to be true.
This test shows that you cannot always rely on your beliefs to be able to make an accurate answer. You have to use a combination of knowledge and truth along with belief to more accuratley do so.
My science and nature score was 8 of 10, and my history and culture test was 6 of 10. To be honest, I believe that I had really just gotten lucky for the most part whenever I got a question that the people who had put together this quiz considered correct. For many of the questions, I had chosen the answers that I believe that I had heard as a statement sometime before. As for the ones that I had no prior knowledge to at all, I made a guess that I believed seemed to be more likely based on what I have been taught in the western point of view and logically. This led to have me think that some people, possibly even most people, tend to just believe statements that we hear, read or are told unconditionally and without any proof or firsthand evidence; believing a statement without any justification, essentially knowledge by acquaintance rather than by description.
The way that I had approached the validity of each statement and possible truth very loosely fits with memory as I am remembering something that I had previously heard, and very heavily on intuition as I initially was very indecisive in my decision before choosing based on what I “felt” and “believed” was correct. However, none of the reasons stated earlier are very accurate, strong, or reliable as a source or evidence to back up my decisions.
I took the science and nature one and got 9/10. The only one i got wrong was that you are heavier on the poles than the equator because gravity is stronger on the poles. I didn't think this was true because I have always thought that the earth was round because of the globe which is perfectly round. The rest I knew because I have heard of those particular facts before.
I got 4/10 on the history one. I think this is because I really didn't know any of these like the science ones so I had to guess and rely on what seemed possible.
I took the science and nature one and got 9/10. The only one i got wrong was that you are heavier on the poles than the equator because gravity is stronger on the poles. I didn't think this was true because I have always thought that the earth was round because of the globe which is perfectly round. The rest I knew because I have heard of those particular facts before.
I got 4/10 on the history one. I think this is because I really didn't know any of these like the science ones so I had to guess and rely on what seemed possible.
I got dominated on the history test getting a 3 out of ten. What I found interesting though is that a couple of the questions like the one asking about what the masses in Europe thought on the earth being round. From the time I have been learning about Columbus and his journey to the new world I have always been told that Columbus was working against all odds and no one thought he could be right. But according to this quiz that is all wrong. I think this is either due to the laziness of our elementary teachers and they just like to keep it nice and easy for themselves, much the same way we are just told you can't use and at the beginning of a sentence when in reality there are special cases. The other possibility is just that someone says something incorrect but enough people believed it and passed it on as true that eventually it was passed on as a given.
On the science and nature test I scored 7 out of 10. I find it interesting that after the test I realized that I picked some of the answers because it was the opposite of what I knew was the common belief. For example I put down that ducks quacks do echo, even though I had heard from several sources that they don't because I figured that would be the reason they would include it on the test.
This method of answering the questions didn't work on lots of questions though. For example I answered true to the monkey bridge question just because I figured it was too crazy to make up, but it turned out to be false.
A better approach probably would have been to just use logic. If I had done that then I may have figured that some of the answers were impossible, such as the monkey bridge one.
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