A new study asked respondents if they thought they would be able to handle a situation presented to them, finding that 70 percent said they could pass a U.S. citizenship test, 55 percent said they could perform the Heimlich maneuver successfully, 38 percent could do a random stranger’s job for a day, 33 percent could survive a week alone in the wilderness and 31 percent thought they could deliver a baby in an emergency. In all but that last scenario, men were considerably more likely than women to think that they could pull it off. There are some scenarios that most people concede they couldn’t do, but nevertheless a contingent of confidents do think they’d manage: 15 percent think they’d survive a week lost at sea on a life raft, 10 percent think they could navigate to a destination using only the stars, nine percent could correctly identify whether a wild mushroom is safe to eat and 18 percent actually think they could safely land a passenger aircraft in an emergency guided by air traffic control.
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