Let's do a round-up of a couple!

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

The burning down of this library is often seen as one of the biggest losses of culture in history. In reality, it seems that the library mostly stored copies of works, and while big, it stored very few *unique* things - therefore, not much was actually lost.

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

The claim is that when there are many bystanders of an incident, none will take responsibility. This is based on the murder of Kitty Genovese, where it was claimed that there were many witnesses, but none of them did anything.

That's false - in fact, the amount of witnesses was limited due to the location, and multiple people alerted the police, but the police failed to respond in a timely manner. More recently, research into the bystander effect suggests that the entire theory is wrong - people *do* consistently come to the aid of others.

THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

Claimed to 'prove' that given power, people will turn malicious and start abusing others. In reality, the experiment was fraudulent, and proved no such thing - the guard in the experiment were actively *encouraged* by the researcher to be abusive.

THE BROKEN WINDOW THEORY

This is often seen as some sort of 'scientifically proven fact' about human behaviour; if you leave vandalism or other "anti-social" behaviour untreated, it will invite more of it.

In reality, this was just made up by a cop in New York, never proven, and used as a justification for violent and oppressive policing tactics. There's no evidence that this is true, or ever was.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

This theory claims that when a group of individuals are given access to a common shared resource, they will each act selfishly and collectively exhaust the resource, whereas it would've been fine if one party controlled access. Usually reference over-grazing.

In reality, this concept (in its current form) comes from a thought experiment where it was just *assumed* to be true, rather than from actual research; and instead there is a long history of shared resources being effectively collectively managed without giving any one party total control over access or distribution.

This doesn't stop authoritarians from using the tragedy of the commons as a justification for their accumulation of power; claiming that otherwise, the resources would be exhausted.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

This theory claims that victims of crime and/or abuse will develop an irrational attachment to the perpetrator, implying that they can no longer be trusted to have agency in determining how to deal with the situation.

In reality, rather than being based in rigorous research, this concept was coined by a criminologist based on a single bank robbery in (as the name implies) Stockholm.

Crucially, the victims were quite clear about the reason for their trust towards the robbers; the police were acting irresponsibly in this incident, endangering people unnecessarily, and therefore the robbers were the more rational and less dangerous party in the conflict. Not quite the 'irrational attachment' that's so often claimed...

Bonus round!

THE LORD OF THE FLIES

This novel featured a group of kids, alone on an island after a plane crash, regressing into conflict and violence, and is often named as a cautionary tale of how things will immediately fall apart when there is no law and order.

Unfortunately, that story is entirely made-up nonsense. A similar incident actually happened in 1966, where a couple of kids from (near) Tonga stranded on the island 'Ata, only being rescued 15 months later.

Contrary to the story in Lord of the Flies, they successfully governed themselves, developed ways to resolve conflicts among themselves, kept themselves healthy even despite injury, and survived the experience.