So picture this: We are done with dinner, and I offer to clean up. About half the chicken and split pea soup (which was really good, by the way!) is left. In the spirit of getting the tough stuff out of the way, I figure I'll start by putting that in a Tupperware. I choose a round Tupperware that I think is plenty large enough for the amount of leftover soup.

As Murphy's Law (which is pretty much the maxim that anything that can go wrong will go wrong) would have it, there was about an eighth of a cup of soup more than was appropriate for the size of the Tupperware. In other words, my Tupperware was not quite big enough. As (bad) luck would have it, that extra eighth of a cup of soup landed pretty much all over the kitchen counter and floor. Let's just say the cleanup ended up being a larger job than was initially expected.

The idea of assuming the worst as a general psychological strategy in life—in other words, adopting the idea of Murphy's Law—is actually, when we think about things from an evolutionary perspective, quite sensible. In other words, this particular social-perceptual bias may well have the capacity to increase the probabilities of both survival and reproduction for our ancestors.

Largely attributed to U.S. aerospace scientist Edward Murphy (whose work was conducted predominantly in the........

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