AtlasReasonPsychology myths quiz

Myths · 15 statements · last reviewed 25 September 2026

Psychology myths quiz

Fifteen popular claims about the mind, true or false, each with a verdict and the study behind it: learning styles, the Mozart effect, venting anger and more.

In short

Fifteen claims about the mind that are widely repeated, some true and some not. Mark each true or false, then check: every verdict says what the cited study found, and links to it. The claims were chosen because each one has a clear primary study or meta-analysis behind the verdict, not because they are the most surprising.

1. Teaching each student in their preferred learning style, such as visual or auditory, measurably improves how much they learn.
Verdict and source

False. A review for the Association for Psychological Science looked for the kind of experiment that could show this, where matching the style helps and mismatching it hurts, and found almost none that did. Style preferences are real; the payoff from matching them was not demonstrated.

Source: Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork (2008), Learning styles: Concepts and evidence, Psychological Science in the Public Interest

2. Listening to Mozart makes you more intelligent.
Verdict and source

False. The 1993 report was about a short-lived improvement on one kind of spatial task, not general intelligence. A meta-analysis of the later studies found little evidence even for that specific effect.

Source: Pietschnig, Voracek and Formann (2010), Mozart effect–Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis, Intelligence

3. People can be sorted into left-brained and right-brained types according to which half of the brain they rely on more.
Verdict and source

False. Some functions are lateralised, but a study of resting brain scans from over a thousand people found no evidence that individuals have a generally stronger left or right hemisphere network.

Source: Nielsen, Zielinski, Ferguson, Lainhart and Anderson (2013), An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis, PLOS ONE

4. Hitting a punchbag while thinking about someone who angered you helps the anger drain away.
Verdict and source

False. In an experiment, people who hit a bag while thinking about the person who had provoked them ended up angrier and more aggressive afterwards than people who did nothing at all.

Source: Bushman (2002), Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame?, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

5. Eating sugar makes children hyperactive.
Verdict and source

False. A meta-analysis of double-blind trials, where neither the children nor the adults knew who had sugar, found no effect of sugar on children's behaviour or thinking.

Source: Wolraich, Wilson and White (1995), The effect of sugar on behavior or cognition in children: A meta-analysis, JAMA

6. Memory works like a video recording: what you remember confidently was stored as it happened.
Verdict and source

False. In a classic experiment, changing one verb in a question about a filmed car crash changed people's speed estimates, and a week later more of those asked with the stronger verb recalled broken glass that was not in the film.

Source: Loftus and Palmer (1974), Reconstruction of automobile destruction, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

7. In the famous 1964 New York murder, 38 neighbours watched the whole attack and nobody did anything.
Verdict and source

False. A review of the court and archive record found no evidence that 38 people watched the attack, and evidence that some witnesses did respond. The story became a teaching parable before it was checked.

Source: Manning, Levine and Collins (2007), The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping, American Psychologist

8. In real public conflicts caught on city cameras, at least one bystander usually steps in.
Verdict and source

True. Analysing camera footage of public conflicts from three countries, researchers found that someone intervened in about nine of every ten.

Source: Philpot, Liebst, Levine, Bernasco and Lindegaard (2020), Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts, American Psychologist

9. Spreading study over several sessions leads to better long-term memory than cramming the same total time into one.
Verdict and source

True. A meta-analysis of hundreds of comparisons found that spaced practice produced better long-term retention than massed practice.

Source: Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer (2006), Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks, Psychological Bulletin

10. Practising recall with a test helps you remember a week later better than spending the same time rereading.
Verdict and source

True. Students who tested themselves on a passage remembered more of it a week later than students who reread it, even though rereading did better on a test given minutes later.

Source: Roediger and Karpicke (2006), Test-enhanced learning, Psychological Science

11. Paying people for an activity they already enjoy can reduce how much they do it for its own sake.
Verdict and source

True. A meta-analysis of experiments found that expected, tangible rewards for doing an interesting task reduced how much people chose to do it freely afterwards.

Source: Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999), A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation, Psychological Bulletin

12. Holding an expansive power pose for two minutes reliably raises your testosterone.
Verdict and source

False. A larger replication of the original study found no effect of the poses on testosterone or on the stress hormone cortisol.

Source: Ranehill, Dreber, Johannesson, Leiberg, Sul and Weber (2015), Assessing the robustness of power posing, Psychological Science

13. Full moons bring measurable rises in psychiatric admissions and crime.
Verdict and source

False. A meta-analysis of studies on lunar phases and human behaviour found no reliable relationship.

Source: Rotton and Kelly (1985), Much ado about the full moon, Psychological Bulletin

14. Switching back and forth between two tasks costs time compared with finishing one before starting the other.
Verdict and source

True. Experiments on task switching found a time cost at every switch, larger when the rules of the tasks were more complex.

Source: Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001), Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

15. The famous 1985 study that called basketball's 'hot hand' an illusion contained a statistical bias, and correcting it changes the conclusion.
Verdict and source

True. Economists showed that the way streaks were counted in the original analysis is biased toward finding no hot hand; corrected for that bias, the original data show evidence of one.

Source: Miller and Sanjurjo (2018), Surprised by the hot hand fallacy? A truth in the law of small numbers, Econometrica

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How the verdicts were chosen

Each statement is written to match the popular version of a claim, and each verdict reports only what its source found. Where the evidence is a single classic experiment, the verdict says so; where it is a meta-analysis or a large replication, it says that. A true statement here is not an endorsement of every popular use of the finding, and a false one does not mean the underlying topic is nonsense: learning preferences exist, for example, even though matching teaching to them has not been shown to help.

What the quiz cannot tell you

A score out of fifteen measures familiarity with these particular findings, not scientific literacy in general. Research also moves: a verdict can change when a larger study appears, which is why every item names its source and the date of this page's last review.