Those things that studies say don't work...

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...but feel like they do.

Using violence to keep a bully away doesn't work well, revenge leads to your own suffering emotionally which is not worth it, and...okay those are really the only things I remember.

Stuff like that.

IanExMachina

Well certain things may not work in the majority of cases and you are in a minority or you don't see the full picture and so cannot comprehend in the same way as the study does.

Gelzo

And there's always the damned lies in statistics.

MoeDantes

"Studies" are bullshit. They work by taking a small sample of the population and pulling their results. This proves that certain patterns play out for that particular sample. Nothing more. But the conclusion is always "it didn't work for these people, therefore it must not work for anyone," which is just this side of asinine bullshit.

I mean, to go by that logic, I can do the debug code in Sonic 3. Many people tried to do the debug code and failed. According to "studies," the debug code doesn't work. Does this make sense?

Khwarizmi

Studies can only suggest trends.  The more studies - or the more extensive studies - you conduct, the more accurate your results are going to be.

Magus

The problem isn't studies, it's how people treat studies. Any professional study will note that there are outliers and that their results only show what is likely to happen. However, your typical news program will extrapolate from it and claim that something works/doesn't work 100% of the time because it's catchier.

In other words, what those guys said.

Stormtroper

^^^ What ^^ said, and you're not a sufficiently large, random sample.

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There's also those kinda contradictory studies, like ones that say abused children don't want to talk about their problems in fear of more abuse from their parents or something, while at the same time i've heard of studies that say using violence to keep someone quiet or behaved (in the sense of "acting in a way that isn't bothersome to me") doesn't work.