Author: Cassandra Yorgey
Edited By: Julia Fisher
Television and movies portray characters doing incredible feats against all the odds because people drink confidence-boosting adrenaline stories right up like they’re the sweet, sustaining nectar of life. Maybe they are. Sharing stories is, in part, what allows humans to increase our shared knowledge exponentially as a species.
Humans are constantly making new discoveries and distilling them into the pool of information containing things that were already known. Each generation keeps learning more through the magic of human storytelling. The flip side is that it can create overconfidence in our abilities, some of which we almost certainly don’t possess. The average person probably thinks they could do any of the following tasks at the drop of a hat, but that’s probably not the case.
Represent the People of Earth
Roughly four out of ten people believe if they made first contact with extraterrestrial aliens from outer space, they would be able to secure peace for the whole planet. Here’s hoping 100% of people can improvise that skill on the fly because there isn’t a plan for that scenario. Given a vast universe of unimaginable size beyond the stars, it seems highly egocentric to assume Earth is the only planet that has produced life. Humanity should probably devise a better collective plan than “eh, I’ll just wing it” to prepare.
Land a Plane
According to a 2023 survey from YouGov, 46% of men think they could land a passenger plane in an emergency. Comparatively, only 20% of women share that confidence. Gayle King and Charles Barkley discussed this strange statistic with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the difference might be in how the question is being interpreted.
DeGrasse suggests men may be assuming support if tossed in the pilot’s seat to land a plane, believing air traffic controllers will talk them through the process over the radio. Women, he suggests, may be more likely to assume no support and interpret the question as being tossed in the cockpit on their own to figure it out.
There have been instances where passengers with no official training could land a plane successfully, but it seems like the riskiest of bets.
Fight a Wild Animal
Humankind didn’t make it to the top of the food chain without being able to fight off wild animals, so the question is more about which animals one believes they could fight bare-handed. According to a 2021 report from YouGov, 6% of Americans think they could win a fight with a grizzly bear. Lions bring in 8%, which seems wildly optimistic when considering the extremely poor win ratio of the historic Roman capital punishment of being thrown into the gladiator ring with a lion.
Make It Into Space
There is nothing like a game of Kerbal Space Program to drive home just how difficult space travel is. Nobody is going to be cobbling together a homemade spacecraft from parts found lying around the junkyard. Still, this video game simulates building a spaceport and launching crafts to different destinations using tiny little minions called “Kerbals.”
Survive Time Travel
The best part of time travel stories is discovering how people think they would survive if transported into the past. The gritty daily realities of other periods are rarely explored, but those details are pretty important if one is, for example, trying to use the “bathroom.” Before toilet paper, the options were even worse than the three seashells of Demolition Man.
Find Hidden Treasure
We all fancy ourselves ammeter sleuths, but very few people ever manage to find hidden treasure – and it’s usually an accident. There is a buried owl statue somewhere in France that readers have been hunting for over thirty years. It was hidden by Max Valentin, who published the clues to its location in a book, On the Trail of the Golden Owl.
Win the Lottery
Statistically, somebody is going to win the lottery. Many people have, but the likelihood of it happening to any individual is phenomenally low. It’s not a skill at which somebody can be good or bad, but that doesn’t stop people from thinking they will have the winning ticket every week.
Make the Shot
Action movies romanticize shootouts and gunfights as survivable events where the good guy just needs a gun to win. Actual marksmanship is certainly a skill improved with training and practice, but first-person shooter video games don’t prepare people for actual violence or the terror adrenaline that comes with the inescapable knowledge there isn’t a respawn point.
Overcome the Bystander Effect
A standard psychological theory indicates that a group of people may be frozen into inaction during an emergency because the weight of responsibility becomes distributed throughout many. This phenomenon is called the Bystander Effect. The best way to combat this quirk of human nature is by knowing about it, so believing is half the battle here.
Score a Tennis Point Against Serena Williams
A true sign of being a top-tier professional athlete is that people who know nothing of sports can still recognize the player. Serena Williams is unarguably one of the greatest tennis champions of all time, and yet one in eight British men think they could score a point in a match against her. Comparatively, only one in thirty-three women hold similar beliefs about their abilities.
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This post was previously published on Wealth of Geeks.
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Photo credit: iStock.com
“10 Unlikely Skills People Think They Have (But Probably Don’t)”
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