The Thing about Some People who are Supposedly Intelligent

Hi everyone,

Sorry it took so long for me to post again. My brain works so slowly sometimes that by the time I had another blog post in mind, two months had gone by. Okay, almost two months. Blah, blah, blah. Time to get to the point of this post, which is....(insert drumroll here) the thing about some really smart people. So: a family member told me about a TV news special that she had seen, and she thought that it was interesting. Normally I would just roll my eyes and go on with my day, but she insisted on telling me about the news thing that she had seen, and despite my best intentions I got interested.

This guy did a study about "stranger danger" (which, by the way, is an incredibly stupid name for something that is actually very serious), in which he stood near a black utility van outside a college with a large video camera on his shoulder, the kind that TV crews use. He asked eight students, at different times of day, who came near if they wanted to be on a reality TV show. Keep in mind, he had no credentials, nothing. Just this video camera and what he said. All of the students said yes. Then he asked them to fill out some paperwork that asked for highly sensitive information - and we're not talking, "have you ever done underage drinking?" We're talking Social Security number, address, phone number, etc. Then, to top it all off, he asked them if they wanted to sit in the van to fill out the paperwork. Warning bells went off in the heads of four of the students, and they immediately walked away. The other four stayed, sat down, and filled out the paperwork.

Wait, what? The college that he was outside of was a good one, relatively hard to get into. The students were supposed to be pretty smart. But here's the thing about some very intelligent people: while they may have gotten an A on every test in high school because they're book-smart, they have no common sense at all. Thankfully, this man wasn't really trying to kidnap them, but he could have if he wanted to. The number of kidnappings of 13-25 year olds has spiked dramatically in the past year. Maybe the problem is just a simple matter of teaching our children not quite enough about being savvy concerning people they don't know well or at all.

- Lazy Girl