Only statements four (Celebrity garbage), ten (the Bible verse) and seventeen (the orb spider) are true. All others are false.
The questions on the quiz were designed to be sufficiently obscure that the average respondent would be forced to guess whether they were true or false. When most of us are in the position of having to determine what makes sense and what does not, we do so by comparing the unknown to the known. Usually, that necessitates bringing to bear what I call categories of the known which organize many of the presumptions, biases, assertions, etc. that we employ when interacting with the rhetoric of daily life. Following are some general definitions of those categories. Please read them and see how well they describe your own experience with taking the "Sense or Nonsense" quiz.
Sometimes we decide that a claim is plausible simply because it sounds like other kinds of claims we have heard. If you thought the questions about the animals (orb spiders, pocket snakes, soldier ants, etc.) were true, it may have been because you have so often heard various "Fun Facts"s about animals with which these resonate. The same goes for questions like the one about the stockbrokers' law, William Shatner (there is much folklore, for instance about who passed up the role of Rick in Casablanca, all of which by the way is false), the political trivia about Peoria, and celebrity garbage. We have heard similar things about similar circumstances, so these new versions of reality seem completely plausible.
Sometimes we are prone to believe a whole statement is true when we are pretty sure that part of it is accurate. There is a Pope Leo, so why not a Lyle? We have heard the phrase "eWill it play in Peoria?" Since the tone of the claim matches the tone of the cliche, we may be more prone to believe it. We know that Karen Allen was in Raiders of the Lost Ark, so any claim that includes that fact might seem more reasonable. If you associate Aristotle with the Academy or know that the transistor was in fact invented at the University of Illinois; if you know that there is such a thing as a pocket snake or a soldier ant; if you know that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet then you may be more willing to accept the plausibility of claims about them on that basis.
If you thought the question about welfare and the New York School System was true (and most of the people who do this exercise do), it could be because the statement--true or not--reinforces a belief or value on which you depend. We are willing at the drop of a hat to believe scandals about people, political parties and movements of whom we disapprove, and extremely resistant to admitting to overwhlming evidence against our heroes and idols. So the NYC schools claim may be more reflective of one's attitude toward welfare (or New York) than of any inherent sense.
Many times, we respond to the context in which the claim appears rather than to to inherent content of the claim. The questions dealing with field hoceky, Mylo the dog, "eReally Bad Tuesday"e Paris, Texas and the Hebrides, racy scriptures, and the etymology of the word "ecareer"e may have stimulated such thoughts as: "eThat's too stupid to be false."e "eWho could make something like that up?"e "eThat's the kind of thing they put on tests like these."e or even just "eWhy not?"e you were probably responding more to the circumstances of the claim than to its content.
Yes, other interpretations present themselves, and yes, combinations of these could and probably do apply in every case. The value of assigning these categories to our interaction with the world is not in our ability to provide an ironclad explanation for the response to a given claim (would that life were so easy); it is to remind us that our responses to the messages with which we interact have far less to do with the "eevidence"e surrounding those claims in many cases than it does with our dispositions toward the subjects about which and the contexts in which claims appear. Both speakers and listeners would benefit manifestly from an increased awareness of the processes of interpretation they employ to separate the Sense from the Nonsense in the world.
I welcome your responses to and comments about this discussion. Please identify the discussion in your subject line and send them to me at Sense Commentary.