Q.Give one example of a popular notion about human behaviour that scientific psychological research has shown to be inaccurate, and explain what the research actually found.

A well-documented example is the once-common belief that giving children only easy problems builds the confidence needed to handle later failure well. …

One clear, research-documented example of a popular notion about human behaviour that turned out to be inaccurate concerns how best to build a child's confidence and persistence in the face of difficulty. Common sense suggests that if a child gives up too quickly when facing a hard problem or a failure, the right response is to give that child easier problems, so that their success rate -- and with it, their confidence -- goes up; only once their confidence is built up, common sense continues, should genuinely difficult problems be introduced.

Carol Dweck's 1975 study tested this common-sense strategy directly. She trained two groups of children for 25 days on maths problems. The first group was given only easy problems that they were always able to solve successfully. The second group faced a mix of easy and difficult problems, and whenever this second group failed on a difficult problem, Dweck told them that the failure was because they had not tried hard enough, encouraging them not to give up. After the 25-day training period, both groups were given a new, harder set of problems. The finding ran directly against common sense: the children who had always succeeded, because they had only ever been given easy problems, gave up considerably faster when they encountered genuine difficulty than the children who had experienced a realistic mix of both success and failure and had been taught to attribute failure to insufficient effort rather than to lack of ability. …