Murphy's law, aka the law of meanness, says: "If some kind of trouble can happen, it happens." Formulated back in 1949, these principles generated a wave of conclusions that are incredibly popular today.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong
The history of the emergence of Murphy's laws is unique in the sense that a randomly spoken phrase led to the emergence of a whole set of witty logical patterns that can explain almost any event.
Captain Edward Murphy worked as an engineer at the Edwards military base in the United States. During the testing of aircraft systems on the project "MX981" of the US Air Force, one of the technicians made the only possible mistake, and the mechanism did not work correctly. Murphy, as one of the developers, was brought in to investigate the incident. He checked all the experimental data and realized that the technicians had incorrectly connected the device. Then he said the phrase that later became famous: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong", which is translated into Russian as "If there is a possibility that some trouble can happen, then it will definitely happen." The phrase, as they say, went to the people and became winged. On its basis, a whole aphoristic system was created, which became part of mass culture thanks to the journalist Arthur Bloch,published in 1977 a collection of "Murphy's Laws".
Edward Murphy himself was very skeptical about such popularity of his maxim. He said that first of all he had in mind the role of the human factor in the design of technical devices.
Soda Law
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Murphy's Laws are a prime example of how successful marketing can make a revelation from already known principles. Long before Edward Murphy uttered the famous phrase, the so-called "Law of Soda" was known in England, which states that everything bad that can happen to a poor fraudster will surely happen to him. In England, Murphy's laws are still called the Soda Law. Also in 1928, the famous magician Adam Hull Shirk argued that "nine out of ten tricks that may not work usually do not work," which is also very similar to the famous Murphy's laws.
In fairness, it must be said that Murphy's laws were also known in our country. Only in Russia they have long been called "the law of meanness" or "the law of the sandwich."
Why does it work?
Tell me honestly, do you often look for reasons why you manage to get to work or do something every day? Now imagine that for some reason you had to be late for work, getting stuck in a traffic jam, or “suddenly” the zipper on your jacket got stuck and you were late for a performance that you have been going to for more than a month.
According to psychologist Steve Briggs, Murphy's laws, with their witty fatalism, work solely because we tend to perceive a favorable set of circumstances as the norm. A person is inclined to explain any mistake by a mass of reasons. There is always an excuse, the simplest is to explain the error by Murphy's laws.
How it works
Despite its artificiality, Murphy's laws actually work. Each of us has met their confirmation more than once in our life. When you are driving in a traffic jam, as soon as you take a free lane, it immediately becomes "standing". Trying to maneuver between checkout counters in a shopping center, we end up losing the most advantageous place. Arriving at the exam, we choose from hundreds of tickets the one for which we do not know the answer.
We tend to explain these things by the "law of meanness", although according to Murphy's laws, any of our choices will invariably lead to a worse result, since "every solution breeds new problems."
If Murphy's laws teach anything, it's ironic about trouble. Which is also a lot.