Sod's law, a British culture

axiom An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word (), meaning 'that which is thought worthy o ...

, states that "if something ''can'' go wrong, it will". The law sometimes has a

corollary In mathematics and logic, a corollary ( , ) is a theorem of less importance which can be readily deduced from a previous, more notable statement. A corollary could, for instance, be a proposition which is incidentally proved while proving another ...

: that the misfortune will happen at "the worst possible time" ( Finagle's law). The term is commonly used in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

(while in North America the phrase " Murphy's law" is more popular). The phrase seems to derive, at least in part, from the

colloquialism Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom normally employed in conversa ...

an "unlucky sod"; a term for someone who has had some bad (unlucky) experience, and is usually used as a sympathetic reference to the person. A slightly different form of Sod's law states that "the degree of failure is in direct proportion to the effort expended and to the need for success." An alternative expression, again in British culture, is "hope for the best, expect the worst".

Comparison with Murphy's law

Sod's law is a more extreme version of Murphy's law. While Murphy's law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (eventually), Sod's law requires that it ''always'' go wrong with the worst possible outcome or at the worst time. Belief in Sod's law can be viewed as a combination of the

law of truly large numbers The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with cons ...

and the psychological effect of the law of selection. The former says we should expect things to go wrong now and then, and the latter says the exceptional events where something went wrong stand out in memory, but the great number of mundane events where nothing exceptional happened fall into obscurity. Sod’s law is also explained as a form of the natural human

negativity bias The negativity bias,Kanouse, D. E., & Hanson, L. (1972). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, S. Valins, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, & B. Weiner (Eds.), ''Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior.'' Morristown, NJ: Gene ...

, the survival trait of being extra alert to negative events.

Examples

Some examples are

traffic lights Traffic lights, traffic signals, or stoplights – known also as robots in South Africa are signalling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings, and other locations in order to control flows of traffic. Traffic lights ...

turning red when a driver is in a hurry, or email software crashing at the exact moment the user attempts to send an important message. Sod's law has also been applied to individuals, such as the composer

Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classic ...

losing his hearing or drummer Rick Allen losing an arm in a car crash. Other examples are dropped bread always landing butter side down, or it raining just after one has washed the car and on the weekend one goes to the beach. A discrediting example is a

coin toss A coin is a small, flat (usually depending on the country or value), round piece of metal or plastic used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order t ...

resulting in tails the more strongly that one wishes the result to be heads.

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. An at ...

said that this shows the idea of Sod's law is "nonsense", as the coin is unaware of the person's wish and has no desire to thwart it.

References

External links

* {{Cite web , last=Scannel , first=Michael , date=August 2002 , title=The basic laws (Murphy’s and Sod’s) , url=https://www.michael-scannell.com/jottings/journ2.html , url-status=live , website=michael-scannell.com Gives an explanation of the difference between them. Adages British culture

Comparison with Murphy's law

Examples

See also

References

External links