Unreasonable actions. The Irrational Man: A Brief Guide to Dealing with Difficult People

Our life is full of various small problems, troubles and mistakes, but most of these problems and mistakes could be avoided if people began to be guided by reason even in simple things. In fact, everything is just the opposite. In this part, we will talk about ordinary examples of the unreasonableness of people that we meet almost every day.

About relationships

Many people behave unreasonably in the field of relationships, family life. For example, feeling that they lack the attention of a spouse, they begin to shower him with reproaches, arrange quarrels, literally demanding attention, or they try to limit him in his hobbies, set ultimatums (or me, or your car / computer / work / friends). As a result, the result is the exact opposite of what is desired, and often this result is a breakup or divorce.

According to the official statistics of the Federal State Statistics Service, in 2010 there were 1,215,100 marriages, and there were 639,300 divorces in the same year. If you try to find surveys of people on the Internet, you can find out that one of the main reasons for divorces is the psychological unwillingness of people to get married.

About Rogue Software

For a while, there was a peak in the popularity and PR of the clothes scanner application on the network, which supposedly allowed you to see people without clothes when you hover your phone's camera at them. In fact, to download such an application, you had to send a paid SMS. The scammers got your money and you got bogus software that didn't scan anything. People downloaded this application really believing in its capabilities, now many have already realized the impossibility of creating such an application based on phones, so this deception is a thing of the past. At some time, the applications "read other people's SMS", "read other people's messages on Vkontakte", "locating a person by number" and others were popular. There are plenty of such divorces and fraudulent tricks, but people tirelessly fall for them, which once again proves human unreason.

About beauty and health

A rather clear evidence of the unreasonableness of people is their attitude towards their own health. It would seem quite obvious that by maintaining your health, paying attention to it, you can prolong your life and improve its quality. If you want something to last a long time, you will take care of it, take care of it, protect it from harmful effects. But people often relate to their health in a completely different way. Alcohol abuse, smoking, the use of narcotic substances, an unhealthy lifestyle that leads to the appearance of various diseases - this is an incomplete list of bullying that a person exposes his body to.

As particular examples, one can consider the bullying of one's body, which people resort to in pursuit of beauty. People forget that beauty is first of all health, and taking care of health is of paramount importance. There are completely natural and effective ways to stay in good shape for many years: a moderate, balanced diet + exercise. Instead, many girls prefer to engage in self-torture, sitting on strict diets that do not allow the body to receive all the nutrients and elements it needs (which are especially important for the growing and developing body of young girls). The consequences of such diets are health problems, ranging from hair loss, deterioration of teeth and nails, and ending with anorexia, which is often fatal. In addition to diets dangerous to life and health, girls, without any medical indications for this, go under the surgeon's knife - in order to correct their figure or face, pump themselves silicone and botox, break the bones of their legs to lengthen them, etc. Intervention in a normally functioning system is always fraught, and many girls forever remain disfigured and with ruined health due to unsuccessful operations.

Men do not lag behind girls, they also often want to look courageous and attractive to the opposite sex. Someone just goes to the gym, and someone starts taking steroids, as a result, not only harming their health, but also creating a body so overloaded with muscle mass that it has nothing to do with beauty, just as they have nothing to do with it. patients with anorexia or victims of plastic surgery.

It is clear that the path to health and beauty lies through a healthy lifestyle and sports. But people also manage to do sports incorrectly, as a result, without benefiting health, but harming it. An example is professional athletes with their professional injuries and illnesses, their early retirement. They force the body to work for wear and tear, bring it to exhaustion, as a result of which it ages early, “breaks” early, wears out. Such sports are harmful to health, while proper exercise strengthens it.

Another clear example of unreasonableness is extreme sports. Unlike those involved in professional sports, extreme sports enthusiasts risk not only their health, but their very lives. And it is completely meaningless, just out of the desire to get certain sensations. The number of accidents among extreme sportsmen is high, but this does not stop them at all.

There are many more irrational people than it seems at first glance. And with many of them you are forced to build communication, because you can’t just ignore them or leave with a wave of your hand. Here are examples of inappropriate behavior of people with whom you have to communicate every day:

• a partner who yells at you or refuses to discuss the problem
• a child trying to get his way with a tantrum;
• an aging parent who thinks you don't care about him;
• a colleague who tries to blame his problems on you.

Mark Goulston, an American psychiatrist, author of popular books on communication, developed a typology of irrational people and identified nine types of irrational behavior. In his opinion, they are united by several common features: irrationals, as a rule, do not have a clear picture of the world; they say and do things that make no sense; they make decisions that are not in their own interests. When you try to get them back on the path of sanity, they become unbearable. Conflicts with irrational people rarely develop into protracted, chronic showdowns, but they can be frequent and exhausting.

Nine types of irrational people

1. Emotional: looking for an outburst of emotions. They allow themselves to scream, slam the door and bring the situation to an unbearable state. These people are almost impossible to calm down.
2. Logical: Appear cold, stingy with emotions, treat others condescendingly. Everything that they see as illogical is ignored, especially the manifestation of the emotions of another person.
3. Emotionally dependent: they want to depend, shift responsibility for their actions and choices to others, put pressure on guilt, show their helplessness and incompetence. The requests for help never stop.
4. Frightened: live in constant fear. The world around them appears to them as a hostile place where everyone wants to harm them.
5. Hopeless: Lost hope. They are easy to hurt, offend, offend their feelings. Often the negative attitude of such people is contagious.
6. Martyr: never ask for help, even if they desperately need it.
7. Aggressive: dominate, subdue. Able to threaten, humiliate and insult a person in order to gain control over him.
8. Know-It-All: See themselves as the only expert on any subject. They like to expose others as profane, to deprive of confidence. They take a position "from above", they are able to humiliate, tease.
9. Sociopathic: exhibit paranoid behavior. They seek to intimidate, to hide their motives. We are sure that everyone wants to look into their souls and use information against them.

What are conflicts for?

The simplest thing in dealing with irrationals is to avoid conflicts by all means, because a positive outcome in a win-win scenario is almost impossible here. But the simplest is not always the best.

The founding father of conflictology, American sociologist and conflictologist Lewis Koser was one of the first to suggest that conflict has a positive function.

Unresolved conflicts hurt self-esteem and sometimes even a basic sense of security.

“Conflict, like cooperation, has social functions. A certain level of conflict is by no means necessarily dysfunctional, but it can be an essential component of both the process of the formation of the group and its sustainable existence, ”Kozera writes.

Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable. And if they are not formally resolved, then they flow into various forms of internal conflict. Unresolved conflicts hurt self-esteem, and sometimes even a basic sense of security.

Avoiding conflict with irrational people is a road to nowhere. Irrationals do not crave conflict on a conscious level. They, like all other people, want to be sure that they are understood, heard and considered with them, however, “falling into” their irrational beginning, they are often not capable of a mutually beneficial agreement.

How are rationals different from irrationals?

Goulston argues that in each of us there is an irrational beginning. However, the brain of an irrational person reacts to conflict in a slightly different way than the brain of a rational person. As a scientific basis, the author uses the triune model of the brain developed by the neuroscientist Paul McClean in the 1960s. According to McClean, the human brain is divided into three parts:

• upper - neocortex, the cerebral cortex responsible for reason and logic;
• the middle section - the limbic system, is responsible for emotions;
• the lower section - the brain of a reptile, is responsible for the basic survival instincts: "fight or flight."

The difference between the functioning of the brain of the rational and the irrational lies in the fact that in conflict, stressful situations, the irrational person is dominated by the lower and middle sections, while the rational person is trying with all his might to stay in the area of ​​the upper brain. An irrational person is comfortable and familiar with being in a defensive position.

For example, when an emotional type yells or slams doors, it feels habitual within that behavior. Unconscious programs of the emotional type encourage him to scream in order to be heard. While the rational has a hard time in this situation. He sees no solution and feels stumped.

How to prevent a negative scenario and stay in a rational beginning?

First of all, remember that the goal of an irrational person is to bring you into his zone of influence. In the "native walls" of the reptilian and emotional brain, an irrational person orients himself like a blind man in the dark. When the irrational manages to lead you to strong emotions, such as anger, resentment, guilt, a sense of injustice, then the first impulse is to “hit” in response. But that is exactly what an irrational person expects from you.

It is not necessary, however, to demonize irrational people or consider them a source of evil. The force that motivates them to behave unreasonably and even destructively is most often a set of subconscious scripts that they received in childhood. Each of us has our own programs. However, if the irrational prevails over the rational, conflicts become a problem area in communications.

Three rules for conflict with an irrational person

Train your self-control. The first step is an internal dialogue where you say to yourself, “I see what is happening. He/she wants to piss me off.” When you can delay your reaction to the remark or action of an irrational person, take a few breaths and exhales, you have won the first victory over instinct. In this way, you regain the ability to think clearly.

Get back to the point. Don't let an irrational person lead you astray. If the ability to think clearly is mastered, it means that you can control the situation with simple but effective questions. Imagine that you are arguing with an emotional type who screams at you through tears: “What kind of person are you! You're out of your mind if you're telling me this! What is this for me! What have I done to deserve such treatment!” Such words easily cause annoyance, guilt, bewilderment and a desire to pay back in kind. If you give in to instinct, then your answer will lead to a new stream of accusations.

Ask the interlocutor how he sees the resolution of the situation. The one who asks the question controls the situation

If you're a conflict avoidant, then you'll want to give up and leave things as they are, agreeing with what your irrational opponent says. This leaves a heavy residue and does not resolve the conflict. Instead, take control of the situation. Show that you hear your interlocutor: “I can see that you are upset about the current situation. I want to understand what you are trying to tell me." If the person continues to tantrum and does not want to hear from you, stop the conversation by offering to return to him later, when he can talk to you calmly.

Take control of the situation. To resolve the conflict and find a way out, one of the opponents must be able to take the reins into their own hands. In practice, this means that after determining the essence, when you heard the interlocutor, you can direct him in a peaceful direction. Ask the interlocutor how he sees the resolution of the situation. The one who asks the question controls the situation. “As far as I understand, you lacked my attention. What can we do to change the situation?” With this question, you will return a person to a rational course and hear what exactly he expects. Perhaps his proposals do not suit you, and then you can put forward your own. However, this is better than an excuse or an attack.

"They told me that this road would lead me to the ocean of Death,
And I turned back half way.
Since then, crooked, deaf roundabout paths have been stretching before me ... "

Five years ago, few people knew about the existence of the ranching town of Granby, Colorado, USA. On June 4, 2004, this city was remembered by many as the last resting place of Marvin Heemeyer.

He worked as a welder, repairing car mufflers. The town of Granby is microscopic, only 2200 inhabitants. He had a workshop there, with a store. In 1992, he officially bought the land plot under this workshop for quite decent money at an auction (something on the order of $42,000), selling his share in a large car service in Denver for this.

He also built snowmobiles as a hobby and used them to drive newlyweds around Granby during the winter. Like in a limousine. He even had a proper license. In my opinion, the uncle was quite good-natured and extremely funny. He served at one time in the Air Force, as an airfield technician, and since then he has been working steadily in the engineering and technical part. He lived to be fifty-two years old, unmarried (some kind of sad love story happened to him at one time, and although later he had girlfriends, he never spoke about marriage again).

His workshop adjoined on one side the territory of the Mountain Park Inc. cement plant. The management of the plant decided to expand production, build another production line. This required land. It seems that there is no need to explain how they buy the land in such cases - all people are adults, you yourself know, there are examples before your eyes. Sooner or later, under the pressure of the authorities, all the neighbors of the plant surrendered. Were redeemed all the plots, except for the ill-fated workshop of Marvin. He was offered quite decent money for the plot, it would seem, what is there, he took money in his teeth, as they said, and go on all four sides, but Heemeyer, it seems, went on principle in this case. Even in 2002, he undertook to challenge in court the decision to allocate the territory for the placement of the plant, he conducted the case himself and, having spent all his savings on this, more than $ 100,000, of course, he lost outright.

In general, having despaired of "culturally" resolving the issue, the peasant, in front of the whole city, began to "purely concretely" press. Marvin has fallen on hard times. Since all the land around the workshop already belonged to the plant, all communications and the entrance to the house were blocked. Marvin decided to build another road, and even bought a decommissioned bulldozer for this " Komatsu D355", independently restoring the engine on it in his workshop (the same ones are used by Gazprom in polar fields).

The city administration refused permission to build a new road. The bank found fault with the registration of a mortgage loan and threatened to take away the house. The retail tax office, the fire inspectorate, the sanitary and epidemiological supervision ran over several times, the latter issued an idiotic fine of $ 2,500 for an enchanting " Junk cars on the property and not being hooked up to the sewer line"("cluttering the territory with scrap metal and lack of connection to the sewer") - I remind you, it was about a car repair shop. The joke here is that Marvin, with all his desire, could not connect to the sewer, because for this it was necessary to dig a ditch, partially 8 feet (yeah, 243 centimeters!), and the owner of the plant, effective owner Cody Docheff, denied it.Marvin paid.

Paying the fine, Heemeyer attached a one-word note to the receipt: "Panties."

A couple of months after that, he holed up in the workshop. At the end of March, his father died. Marvin went to bury him, and while he was away, the electricity and water were turned off for him and the workshop was sealed. After that, he closed himself in the workshop. Virtually no one else saw him.

It turns out that Marvin has been working on his armored bulldozer fighter for a year and a half. He carefully prepared: for the review, he adapted video cameras with image output to monitors inside the cockpit. The chambers were protected from external damage by 3-inch bulletproof glass, and air compressors were connected to them in case they were blinded by dust and debris. Onboard fans and air conditioning were used for cooling. Prudently stocked up with food, water, ammunition and a gas mask. I took a large-caliber .50 Barrett M82 (12.7 mm) with me, and two semi-automatic carbines: the Ruger Mini-14 and the Belgian assault FN FNC. Get in myself. With the help of a makeshift remote-controlled crane, he lowered a box of armor onto a bulldozer, locking himself inside - he no longer expected to get out of it.

At 2:15 pm, Heemeyer presented his final argument against the corrupt government...

Then everything was very scary. The miracle bulldozer was moving slowly along the intended route, and it was impossible to stop it. Marvin made a list of targets ahead of time. Anyone who felt it necessary to take revenge. "Sometimes," as he put it in the note, " reasonable men must do unreasonable things"("Sometimes reasonable people are forced to do unreasonable things"). On his armored bulldozer, Heemeyer ironed the streets in the city center for two hours, methodically destroying, according to the list, everything in his path. To begin with, he drove through the territory of the plant, carefully turning the plant administration building, production workshops and, in general, everything down to the last barn. Then he moved around the town and began to systematically demolish building after building, flattening and ironing with caterpillars the parked patrol police cars at the same time. He removed the facades from the houses of the members of the City Council. Caused significant damage to the newly erected Liberty Bank building, which tried to press him through the early return of the mortgage loan. Destroyed the buildings of the gas company "Xcel Energy", which refused to fill its kitchen gas cylinders after a fine, the office of the City Council, the building of the City Hall, the fire department, the warehouse, several residential buildings belonging to the mayor of the city. He razed to the ground the editorial office of a local newspaper that campaigned against him. In short, he demolished everything that had anything to do with the local authorities, including their private houses. Moreover, he showed good awareness of who owns what.

They tried to stop Himeyer. First, the local sheriff with deputies. Let me remind you that the bulldozer was equipped with centimeter spaced armor. The local police used revolvers-nines and shotguns. With clear results. Zero. The local SWAT detachment (Special Purpose and Rapid Response Detachment) was alerted. Then forest rangers. SWAT had grenades, the rangers had assault rifles. Some particularly dashing sergeant jumped from the roof onto the hood of a bulldozer and tried to throw a stun grenade into the exhaust pipe. the grate, so that the only thing that the bulldozer lost as a result was the actual pipes. The sergeant, of course, also survived. The driver's teardrop did not take - the monitors were visible even in a gas mask.

Heemeyer returned fire through loopholes specially made in the armor on the left, right and front, respectively. But, according to experts, he did everything to ensure that no one was hurt by his fire, shooting more to intimidate and not letting the police stick their nose out from behind the cars. None of the police officers received a scratch, because he shot well above their heads. In other words, to the sky. However, the police did not dare to approach him any more. In total, counting the rangers, by that time there were about 40 people. The bulldozer took more than 200 hits from everything from service revolvers to M-16s and grenades.

They tried to stop him with a hefty scraper - "Komatsu" without much difficulty, like a child's toy, shoved the scraper backwards into the front of the store and left it there. A car filled with explosives, which was placed in the path of a bulldozer, also failed to stop its movement. The only achievement was a radiator pierced by a ricochet - however, as the experience of our career work shows, such bulldozers do not immediately pay attention even to a complete failure of the cooling system. Hotshots from the Police Department have already seriously discussed the possibility of destroying a bulldozer with homing anti-tank air-to-ground missiles. AGM-114 Hellfire, and asked for support from Apache combat helicopters at one of the local air bases, but they were in no hurry to answer. All that the police could do was to evacuate 1.5 thousand local residents (the city's population is 2,200 people) and block all roads, including federal highway No. 40 leading to the city (the blocking of the federal highway was especially shocking for everyone).

Marvin Heemeyer's war ended at 16:23.

Before heaps, Marvin decided to tear down the small wholesale store "Gambles". In my opinion, there was simply nothing more to demolish there, there was still a station for refueling liquefied gas, but its explosion would have smashed half the town, not making out where the mayor's house was and where the scavenger was. The bulldozer was covered with debris from the roof, it got stuck and stalled. Heemeyer fired back for a while, then stopped. In the sudden deathly silence, steam escaping from a broken radiator whistled furiously ...

The police were afraid to approach the bulldozer for more than two hours. They feared the last trap that Marvin might lay for them. Then they made a hole in the armor for a long time, trying to get the welder out of his caterpillar fortress (three plastic charges did not give the desired effect). When the armor, already the next morning, was finally pierced by an autogen, the driver had already been dead for half a day. Heemeyer kept the last cartridge for himself. He wasn't the type to give up...

The city was damaged for $5.000.000, the plant - for $2.000.000. As Gov. Bill Owens put it, "the city looks like it's been tornadoed through." At the scale of the town, this meant almost complete destruction.

The plant never recovered from the attack and sold the area along with the ruins.

Then the investigation began. It turned out that "Heemeyer's creation was so reliable that it could withstand not only a grenade explosion, but also a not very powerful artillery shell." Marvin was a born engineer, and his skill as a welder was legendary: he calculated the spaced composite armor with a margin. Each of its sheets consisted of two plates of half-inch (about 1.3 cm) steel, between which there was a cement cushion. Even the caterpillars of the bulldozer were partially covered with armor plates. In order to lower this shell onto the cab of a bulldozer, he used a makeshift crane. "Lowering it, Heemeyer knew that after that he would not get out of the car," police experts said. “He was a nice guy,” recall people who knew Marvin closely. "You shouldn't have pissed him off... If he was your friend, then he was your best friend. Well, if the enemy is the worst ..."

Some smart people wanted to put the bulldozer on a pedestal and make it a landmark, but the majority insisted on melting it down. The Killdozer, along with the armor, was quietly sold for scrap, to several different locations and with all precautions so that the fragments of the "vengeance tank" would not be taken away for souvenirs.

For many, this case causes, as you might guess, extremely mixed emotions ...

Marvin Memorial Site
How it was. Video

P.S. Five years later. The town, although it was rebuilt, but in everything - it is a slow kirdyk. Houses for sale signs everywhere. The only one who cuts the loot on this is the owner of the gas station. He has a KILLDOZER-themed souvenir shop there: baseball caps with portraits of the hero, plastic copies of his "wonder tank", posters and other stray. And the owner's son had problems with television companies for sawing CDs with recordings of live reports and selling them for souvenirs ...

Much depends on HOW to present the story, and HOW to place accents. In the official version, the opinion of only one side was voiced. Heemeyer himself will not object. But here are some interesting details from Russell R. Bingman ( An attempt at investigative journalism ): Specifically, the local firefighter who helped retrieve Marvin's body claimed, on condition of anonymity, that there were no weapons inside the cockpit, and assault rifles "magically" materialized much later. The equipment of the "tank" was presented to journalists only 10 days later. The results of the autopsy are unknown. And local sheriff Rod Johnson and a couple of his henchmen specifically hated Heemeyer.

And one more story, from Russian reality:

"Social problems in business are a common thing. You have to be able to work with the state apparatus and political structures - and everything can be solved. We have very good experience in solving such problems in different regions, it turned out to be especially interesting in the city of Achinsk.

One trade union leader went against the rules and began to blackmail us - he tried to raise the labor movement, journalists, and all that stuff ... This poor fellow, Smolentsev, did not take into account that Achinsk is a very criminal city. We just removed all the protection of the state from the trade unionist for a while. And why should the government protect those who are against it? Actions began ... Some time later, he went to swim in the pond, but his heart could not stand it from stress - he drowned. It came out funny. The body was found. The trade union activists gathered - screams, why the whole head and neck behind the corpse allegedly had a continuous bruise, the fingernails were torn off - they seemed to have tortured and killed him. A forensic expert worked, I myself asked Vladimir Vasilyevich Ustinov, the Prosecutor General, to check ...

The result was very professional, it was conveyed to the public. The man swam, the pond is quite large, forty meters. Depth two meters. The wind was blowing, the wave was big. The trade unionist's heart gave out. He was out of breath, but he was still climbing along the shore, tearing off his nails. And when he was exhausted, he was beaten by a wave against a coastal stone, his head and the back of his head. Hence the hematoma on the corpse, and not from bandit torture. All sorts of social activists made noise, accused us, initiated a criminal case three times - the result is the same. Died of a seizure...

Now we have no problems in Achinsk. The plant is ours... So it's not worth bringing the matter to mass riots, we need to act proactively. You have to be professional."

If anyone has forgotten, on June 15, 2002, the leader of the independent Sotsprof trade union of the Achinsk Alumina Refinery, Yuri Smolentsev, went to his dacha and disappeared. Nobody saw him again. Alive. He disappeared two weeks before the start of the court session on the payment of the 120 million rubles long service allowance to the workers of the AGK. On the scale of Deripaska - the amount is small, but in this case it was not only about money. If the court upheld the claim, then the results of the AGK privatization would have been revised, and Rusal could well have lost not only the above money, but the entire plant.

Prior to this, several attacks had already been committed on Smolentsev, an attempt was made to kidnap him. Three days before his death, he wrote: "If a car ran over me, I drowned, or I had an accident in the form of a brick that fell on my head - do not believe it. This means that they will kill me."

Two weeks of searching... The body was fished out in a dirty pond, 30 by 30 meters in size, which was considered shameful even for homeless people to swim in. The corpse did not look decomposed at all. Divers had scoured the lake two days before. The conclusion of the CourtMedical Expertise: no signs of violent death were found on the body of the deceased. Investigation verdict: drowned while swimming in the lake due to heart failure. The case was closed.

People often do really crazy things. Some do it because of their innate courage, others do it under the influence of alcohol, and there is no reasonable explanation for the actions of the third. In our review of 16 situations, when people in a variety of situations behaved unexpectedly: someone heroically, someone ridiculous, and someone became a hostage to the situation.

1. Yellow snow

Driver Richard Kral was caught in a snow drift during an avalanche. He chose a rather unusual way to attract attention to himself. Richard drank 30 liters of beer and pissed on the snow until he painted a huge "Never eat yellow snow!" sign on it, visible even from helicopters. Rescuers found him drunk on a mountain path 4 days later

2. Ripper

Vance Flozenzier was relaxing on a beach in Florida with his nephew when an 8-year-old boy was attacked by a bull shark, biting off his arm. Vance was so enraged that he threw the shark out of the water onto the shore and beat it to death, taking the boy's hand out of the predator's throat. Doctors were able to sew the child's hand back on.

3.Resistant tin peddler

Josh Lewis, the pizza delivery man, has shown phenomenal commitment to his job. During the next delivery, robbers stopped him, taking away the scooter, and Josh himself was stabbed with a knife. But the delivery man on his own two, bleeding, fulfilled the order, bringing the pizza to the address. Only then did he go to the hospital.

4. Hungry tourist

Chinese Poon Lim managed to survive for 133 days on a life raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He even managed to kill a shark with the help of a drinking tank included in the raft package.

5. Himself a surgeon

Australian Whitrow cut himself with a chainsaw. However, he stitched up his wounds, drank a bottle of gin, and got behind the wheel to get to the hospital. As a result, he was stopped by the police and fined for drunk driving.

6. The power of a stereotype

Apparently re-reading medieval romance and pseudo-fiction, the legendary Jack Churchill fought in World War II using only a long sword and bow.

7. Permissible damage

Michael Moylan from Florida tried to kill his wife while sleeping by shooting him in the head. As a result, he woke up in the morning with a severe headache.

8. Priorities are set

After Thomas Dotterer was shot in the eye during a robbery at his liquor store, he told reporters that his worst performance of the week was his performance at a wrestling competition.

9. Willingness to speak out

During a campaign speech in 1912, US presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt was shot by someone named John Schrank. Despite the fact that the bullet hit Roosevelt in the chest, he insisted on finishing his 90-minute speech.

10. Juvenile veteran

Jacqueline Lucas illegally joined the Marine Corps at the age of 14, after which he took part in the assault on Iwo Jima, not even having a rifle. At the same time, he fell under the simultaneous explosion of two grenades, but survived.

11. Iron Man

Walter Summerford was struck by lightning three times during his lifetime. Yet he survived each time. After Walter's death, lightning also struck his grave twice.

12. Death at work

When Susan Kuhnhausen's husband hired a hitman to kill his wife in 2006, he never expected the end result. The wife strangled the killer with her bare hands.

13. Desire to live

In 1823, Hugh Glass survived (with a crippled leg) a bear fight. The rest of his group believed that Hugh was missing and returned to base without him. Hugh traveled to the nearest city, located at a distance of 360 kilometers, within six weeks.

14. Unbroken Perseverance

A homeless man known as "Hardy Mike" drank a can of antifreeze to get insurance, but when it didn't work, he threw himself under a taxi.

15. Lead hangover

The 35-year-old Pole was shot in the head when he was drunk, he did not even notice it. As a result, the bullet was accidentally discovered five years later.

16. Swim or drink

In 2007, 55-year-old Martin Strel swam 5,268 kilometers in the Amazon for over 66 days. He drank two bottles of wine a day to keep warm during his swim.

Continuing the topic of the review, no less funny stories.

Being smart and making wise decisions are not the same thing. Experts are convinced that a high level of intelligence affects grades at school, success at work, and even relationships with the law. But it does not guarantee well-being, life satisfaction and longevity. About the difference between critical thinking and intelligence, the stupidity of smart people and the qualities that help us avoid negative events, in the material of Heather Butler, assistant professor of psychology at California State University (CSUDH).

All of us are probably familiar with someone smart who does stupid things surprisingly often. My family rejoices by pointing out times when I (the professor) make really stupid mistakes. What does it mean to be smart or intelligent? Our daily use of the term is intended to describe someone who is knowledgeable and makes wise decisions, but this definition is at odds with how intelligence is traditionally measured. A well-known measure of intelligence is the level of intelligence, which is measured using an IQ test that includes visuospatial puzzles, math tasks, visual search and pattern recognition tasks, and vocabulary questions.

The benefits of intelligence are undeniable. Intelligent people are more likely to get better grades and succeed in school. They are more likely to be successful at work. And they are less likely to get into trouble (like commit crimes) as teenagers. However, given all the benefits of intelligence, you may be surprised to know that it does not determine other life accomplishments such as well-being. You might imagine that success at school or at work could lead to greater life satisfaction, but there was no evidence in several large studies that IQ affects life satisfaction or longevity. Grossman and colleagues argue (1) that most intelligence tests fail to capture real-world decision making and our ability to interact well with others. In other words, perhaps this is why "smart" people do "stupid" things.

On the other hand, the ability to think critically is associated with health, well-being and longevity. Although often confused with intelligence, critical thinking is not intelligence. Critical thinking is a set of cognitive skills that enable us to think rationally and purposefully, and the tendency to use these skills when needed. Critical thinkers are friendly skeptics. They are flexible thinkers who need evidence to support their beliefs and help them recognize misguided attempts to convince them. Critical thinking means overcoming all sorts of cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias, assertion of bias, etc.).

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Critical thinking helps predict a wide range of life events. In a series of studies (2, 3) conducted in the US and abroad, my colleagues and I found that critical thinkers experience fewer life problems.

We asked people to take an inventory of life events and evaluate critical thinking (critical thinking assessment according to D. Halpern ⓘ Diana Halpern is a researcher and author of The Psychology of Critical Thinking.). This score measures the five components of critical thinking, including verbal reasoning, argument analysis, hypothesis testing, probability and uncertainty analysis, decision making, and problem solving.

In the list of negative life events, there were cases from different areas: from academic (for example, I forgot about the exam), from the field of health (for example, I contracted a sexually transmitted infection because I did not use a condom), legal (for example, I was arrested for driving under the influence of illegal substances), interpersonal (for example, I cheated on my partner with whom I had been for over a year), financial (for example, I have more than 5 thousand dollars in credit card debt), etc. We repeatedly found that critical thinkers experience fewer negative life events. This is an important finding because there is a lot of evidence that critical thinking can be taught and improved.

What is better: to be able to think critically or to have high intelligence? My latest research focused on comparing these properties of the human psyche to see which one is associated with fewer negative life events (4). People who were strong in intelligence or critical thinking experienced fewer negative events, but critical thinkers did better.

Intelligence and its improvement are hot topics that receive a lot of attention today. It's time to learn a little more about critical thinking as well. Keith Stanovich wrote a whole book about it: "What Aptitude Tests Miss" ⓘ Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss. Yale University Press (2010). Reasoning and rationality are more related to what we mean when we say that the human mind is not limited to spatial skills and mathematical abilities. In addition, it is difficult to improve intelligence, which is largely determined by genetics. Critical thinking, however, can improve with training, and its benefits have been shown to persist over time. Anyone can improve their critical thinking skills, and we can safely say that doing so is the smart thing to do.

Research Links

1. Grossmann, I., Na, J., Varnum, M. E. W., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2013). A route to well-being: Intelligence versus wise reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(3), 944-953.

2. Heather A. Butler. Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment Predicts Real-World Outcomes of Critical Thinking. Applied Cognitive Psychology: Volume 26, Issue 5, September/October 2012, Pages 721–729.

3. Heather A. Butler, Christopher P. Dwyer, Michael J. Hogan, Amanda Franco, Silvia F. Rivas, Carlos Saiz, Leandro S. Almeida. The Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment and real-world outcomes: Cross-national applications. Thinking Skills and Creativity: Volume 7, Issue 2, August 2012, Pages 112-121.

4. Heather A. Butler, Christopher Pentoney, Mabelle P. Bong. Predicting real-world outcomes: Critical thinking ability is a better predictor of life decisions than intelligence. Thinking Skills and Creativity: Volume 25, September 2017, Pages 38-46

According to materials: Why do Smart People Do Foolish Things / Scientific American.

Cover: Alfred Hitchcock (1963).