I saw this image on Facebook and wondered to myself, “Is that the real statistic, or is that in face how we see things in the world?”.  My guess is the latter.  My guess is if you actually looked at the statistics there would be a normalized bell curve around 50% for the times that a USB was plugged in correctly.

So why would most people agree with the 89% number?

My guess is that people tend to remember the failures in their lives more than the successes.  Also, because we live in a society where we focus on giving attention to failures instead of recognizing our successes our subconscious feeling is that we fail more often than we achieve success.

So if you really feel you put your USB stick in to the slot incorrectly 89% of the time, perhaps you should worry less about your USB insertion abilities and more about your attention to the failures in your life.