Debunking myths: a behavioural science rulebook
Crawford HollingworthThe Behavioural Architects
Myths are easy to form and hard to shift. Remember Popeye and how he gulps down a tin of iron-rich spinach to boost his strength and save the day? The truth is he would have been stronger eating venison and mussels, which have a higher and more easily absorbed iron content.
The Popeye cartoon helped to propagate a 50-year-old myth that spinach is incredibly iron rich and can make you stronger. The myth itself stems from work by a German chemist called Erich von Wolf.
In 1870, researching the...