“Leopards Ate My Face”: 50 Examples Of Karma Working Just The Way It Should

Writer and humorist Robert Evans Wilson Jr. has a name for making these rash decisions in the heat of the moment, only to regret the results.

He calls it the Law of Unintended Consequences, and according to Wilson, we're all guilty of succumbing to it.

Relevant terms include:

1. Murphy’s Law, which states that if something can go wrong, it will.
2. The Cobra Effect. The term coined by economist Horst Siebert is based on an attempt by the British government in India to eliminate venomous snakes in the city of Delhi by paying people to bring in dead cobras. The reward incentivized people to breed cobras. When the government learned of this, it stopped the payments; however, the breeders then released their cobras into the wild, which increased rather than decreased the problem.
3. The Butterfly Effect. It's a situation in which an action or change that does not seem important has a very large effect, especially in other places or around the world.

"When a problem occurs, whether it is a natural disaster or a man-made one, emotions over reason often direct decision-making," Wilson, author of Everyday Innovation, explains.

As we can see from the pictures on this list, it happens not just on a personal but also (inter)national stage, even though there are plenty of "safety switches" to prevent it.

"First, the media picks up on the story and, if possible, will fan the flames of fear to build a larger audience, which in turn enables them to sell more advertising. If the media is successful in agitating their audience, the people then start demanding immediate solutions from their government representatives. The politicians feel the pressure and, wanting to stay popular with the voters, feel they must do something—anything—without considering the potential long-term outcome," Wilson says.

Many of these posts from r/LeopardsAteMyFace also make you ask, "Why do people ignore facts?"

Steve Rathje is an incoming assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, currently an NSF and AXA postdoctoral fellow at NYU, with a Ph.D. from Cambridge.

He believes much of the issue is caused by the fact that our ability to reason did not develop simply to help us find the truth—instead, it evolved to fulfill fundamentally social functions, like cooperating in large groups and communicating with others.

"A number of studies document the many ways in which our political party distorts our reasoning," Rathje writes.

"One study found that people who had strong math skills were only good at solving a math problem if the solution to the problem conformed to their political beliefs. Liberals were only good at solving a math problem, for instance, if the answer to that problem showed that gun control reduced crime. Conservatives were only good at solving this problem if the solution showed that gun control increased crime."

Another study discovered that the higher an individual’s IQ, the better they are at coming up with reasons to support a position—but only a position that they agree with.

One time, researchers asked the participants to watch a video of protestors and told half of them the people in the clip were protesting the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, while the other half were informed that the group was protesting an abortion clinic.

Liberals reported saying the protestors were more violent and disruptive if they were told they were watching abortion clinic protestors, and the opposite was true for conservatives, even though everyone was watching the same video.

A desire for identity consistency, as Rathje calls it, might also help explain why we can be so uncomfortable engaging with opinions that challenge our beliefs.

One study, for example, found that people are even willing to give up the chance to earn money to avoid reading opinions they disagree with.

So even if you told the folks in the pictures what they were doing was stupid, many would've likely kept going anyway.