Real or Myth?
Animal Mindsets and Shop Tricks, Checked

The alpha idea came from research on captive wolves, which L. David Mech described as "non-natural assortments". Mech, whose 1970 book The Wolf spread the term, spent 13 summers watching wild wolves on Ellesmere Island and concluded in 1999 that "the typical wolf pack is a family", with the adult parents guiding it. The wolves that lead most packs, his website now says, are "merely breeders, or parents". In the rare packs with more than one breeding animal, he still speaks of a "dominant breeder".

SOURCE Mech, Canadian Journal of Zoology, 1999; Mech's website.

No eagle does this. Without talons and beak a raptor "would certainly die of starvation", the University of Minnesota's Raptor Center told Snopes. Beaks and talons are keratin, "somewhat similar to human fingernails", and keep growing throughout the bird's life, and feathers are replaced gradually in a moult, not all at once. In the wild, bald and golden eagles can live 20 to 25 years, according to the National Eagle Center, so the extra 30 to 40 years the story promises are invented too.

SOURCE Snopes, quoting the Raptor Center; National Eagle Center.

The evidence is old and mixed, and it turns on how slowly the water is heated. Victor Hutchison, a zoologist who studied how amphibians handle heat, called it "entirely incorrect": in standard tests the water is warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit a minute, and the frog becomes "more and more active in attempts to escape". Harvard's Douglas Melton said in 1995: "If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot." On the other side are a few 19th-century experiments. In 1872 A. Heinzmann heated healthy frogs very slowly, over about 90 minutes, and in some trials a frog sat still from 23 to 39 degrees Celsius. Nobody has shown a frog sitting still until the water boiled: Heinzmann stopped short of boiling, at under 40 degrees, because trial runs had convinced him that from about 37.5 degrees the frogs became paralysed until they died. His water warmed about six times more slowly than in the modern tests, and in 1882 a researcher who varied the speed reported he could reproduce both the escapes and the stillness; by the end of the century the consensus was that slow enough heating could keep a frog still.

SOURCE Hutchison in Ecoviews; Melton in Fast Company, 1995; Offerman and van der Veen, 2010, on Heinzmann, 1872.

The biology is real; the conclusion is not. Lobsters have "a perpetual supply of telomerase", the enzyme that restores the ends of chromosomes, which is why they do not show the usual signs of ageing. But they still die. Each moult takes more energy as they grow, and "common causes of death for lobsters are exhaustion, immobility, and shell disease", although predation is the leading cause. The Natural History Museum in London calls the idea that lobsters live forever a myth.

SOURCE McGill Office for Science and Society; Natural History Museum, London.

It is a line from Game of Thrones, spoken by Tywin Lannister in the episode You Win or You Die, first aired on 29 May 2011: "A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of a sheep." A reworded version appeared on social media in October 2012.

SOURCE Barry Popik, word-origin researcher.

They do not. When an ostrich senses danger and cannot run, it "flops to the ground and remains still, with its head and neck flat on the ground", and from a distance it looks as if the head has gone. The idea is old: Pliny the Elder, in the first century, wrote that ostriches think that when they have thrust their head and neck "into a bush" the whole body is hidden.

SOURCE San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance; Pliny, Natural History 10.1.

"No bird's sense of smell is cued to human scent," as Scientific American puts it. What can cause abandonment is disturbance: a nest disturbed by a potential predator early on, during nesting or egg-laying, may be deserted. Once the young have hatched, parents are "by and large pretty tenacious". The same article says a baby bird found on the ground without its fledgling feathers can be returned to a nest within easy reach, and that most often the parents are watching from a distance.

SOURCE Scientific American, quoting Frank Gill and Thomas Martin.

This one holds up, with a condition. Thomas and Morwitz (Journal of Consumer Research, 2005) found that a 9-ending price seems smaller than a price one cent higher only when the leftmost digit changes ($2.99 against $3.00). In catalogue field tests by Anderson and Simester (2003), a 9 ending increased demand in all three experiments; in one, changing a dress from $34 to $39, where the first digit stays the same, raised demand by a third. The sales effect does not always follow: a 2013 field experiment found .99 endings can make no difference.

SOURCE Thomas & Morwitz, 2005; Anderson & Simester, 2003; Filippin, 2013.

It is called the decoy or attraction effect, and it is real in the lab: Huber, Payne and Puto (1982) showed that adding an option clearly worse than one of the others can raise that option's share. How far it reaches real shopping is argued. Frederick, Lee and Baskin (2014) found the effect may be limited to product descriptions made entirely of numbers, and does not typically occur when people experience the product. Huber, Payne and Puto replied that the effect "remains robust" when the original conditions are replicated.

SOURCE Huber, Payne & Puto, 1982 and 2014; Frederick, Lee & Baskin, 2014.

The famous result is Ronald Milliman's 1982 study: in a single supermarket over nine weeks, slow-tempo music brought slower traffic and higher sales than fast-tempo music. A 2012 field experiment found the slow-tempo effect depended on the music: in a minor key slow music did better, while in a major key tempo made no difference. And a 2025 conference paper, testing tempo in 140 stores of one chain, found no significant effect on overall sales, though members of the loyalty programme spent more with slow music.

SOURCE Milliman, 1982; Knoeferle et al., 2012; Krywuczky, Verlegh and Kocaman, 2025.

We found no study behind the figure; the versions we read state it without a source. The 95% only works in a narrow sense: for a skill like the violin, most people in the world have spent no time at all, so almost any practice puts you ahead of them. Against people who actually do the thing, about 16 minutes a day (100 hours a year) is a start, not the top 5%. The useful part is the habit, not the statistic.

SOURCE No primary source found for the figure.

The number comes from a 1993 study of violin students by Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer. Ericsson later explained that the most accomplished students had put in "an average of ten thousand hours" by the age of twenty; "half of the ten violinists in that group" had not. There is "nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours", he wrote; what mattered was deliberate practice with feedback. How much practice explains is itself argued: a 2014 meta-analysis, as corrected by its authors in 2018, found deliberate practice explained 24% of the differences in performance in games, 23% in music and 20% in sports. Ericsson replied that the meta-analysis had defined deliberate practice "much more broadly" than he had, and said a later sports analysis by two of its authors counted almost any sport-specific activity, even watching games on television.

SOURCE Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993; Ericsson and Pool, 2016; Macnamara, Hambrick & Oswald, 2014.