I am looking for studies that attempt to document how many accurate and inaccurate statements an “average” person says during an “average” day.
We have all heard that 73.4% of statistics (including this one) are made up on the spot.
I understand that for a long time it was believed that 50% of what is taught in medical school is wrong and that this number hasn’t changed in many years.
etc.
many things said by people are inaccurate/wrong.
My question is: how many?
I am not attempting to define “person” or “average” or “average day” in an effort to get as many cites as possible. I am sure if studies have been done, they are restricted in some way and I am interested in as many studies on this as I can find.
Essentially, has anyone gone and fact-checked everything people said at a meeting, party or some other approximately day-long event.
I am of the opinion that the % inaccuracy will be quite high, but would like someone to find a study where this is demonstrated.
My google-fu is woefully insufficient to find anything useful on this subject.
I think the biggest difficulty would be to even find any person where every statement they made that day is documented. The most likely would be political leaders, like the President or Prime Ministers, but much of their day is spent in private, confidential meetings with their advisers.
This is a misunderstanding of how medical schools actually work – the idea that something is either right or wrong. Most medical facts are really ‘ranges’ or ‘averages’, not a specific value.
For example, normal body temperature is said to be 98.6 degrees F (~37.5 C). But in fact, many people normally run 1-2 degrees F lower or higher as their regular temperature. And vary over the day. So you could say 98.6 is wrong. But medical students understand that is just an average, and that it will vary for any individual patient. So they see it as right.
And the other part of this is that medical research is continuing, and regularly coming up with new information and new treatments. There is obviously a time lag before such new information becomes part of the standard school curriculum.
I understand that linguists sometimes record casual conversations and essentially use them as a dataset.
Part of research involves clarifying the study question. As noted, accuracy is best perceived as something that is a range and not a binary yes/no characteristic. Furthermore, there is a tradeoff between accuracy and clarity: what is absolutely accurate and comprehensive often involves a fair amount of elaboration, unnecessary and inappropriate to most social contexts.
The biggest difficulty in studying this is determining what are and aren’t accurate statements. Context is important. If I say “I’ve only ever seen black dogs”, you can claim it is statistically unlikely, look for evidence that the statement is false, but without being inside the speakers mind, you can’t judge the truth of their statements. Similarly, what is true is entirely defined by the person evaluating the statement(i.e. “Women are attractive” is true to me, but not my wife). Also, as MforM noted, accuracy is a spectrum, not a black/white comparison.
I’ve thought about doing this to myself. I feel like I lie many times that I don’t need to, and without conscious thought. My thought was to secretly record my day and play it back and count the lies and categorize them. Basically to fact-check myself.
This is a bit off-topic, but lying fascinates me. Lying is one of the most odd behaviors we do as human beings. You can’t always tell the truth, and you can’t always lie. We despise being lied to, meanwhile, we all do it. We espouse honesty as one of the highest virtues. Lying is also necessary to function in society, at least for me. Sometimes I lie to protect the feelings of others, sometimes I lie to make things easier for myself, sometimes I lie because I’m ashamed of the truth, sometimes I lie to get an advantage, sometimes I don’t even know why I lie.
I highly recommend Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater. It’s digs into philosophical/psychological aspects of lying through a memoir that tells you from the outset that the whole book might be a lie.
There are a vast array of kinds of specific failures to communicate clearly, correctly, and fully. Even “lies” come in about 5 flavors.
Until the OP understands a lot more about the philosophical nature of knowledge, the reality of human mental states, and the vagaries of communication through language, there’s not much to say here.
The original question is rather close to asking “How many smokes are there?”