People seize on spurious longevity facts to feel death can be kept at bay

Evidence

Your officemate’s telling you that people with high tolerance to cold live longer gets you thinking. Your brain’s hungry pincers grasp and hold on to this idea. You believe that you can hold death at a distance if you walk to work without an overcoat. Indeed, in a clever study to demonstrate this point, researchers found that people who were told that having a high tolerance for cold is associated with longevity subsequently kept their hands plunged into a bucket of ice water longer than others who were not informed of this (completely spurious) association. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 636

Categorization

• CANDY: The ice-water experiment is a grimly funny vignette — people hold hands in ice water because of a made-up fact about cold tolerance. Good party conversation.
• SHARE: Send to anyone into social psychology experiments — the spurious cold-tolerance finding is delightfully absurd.
• XREF: connects to: Survival itself is nonsensical and demands readiness for death