Another property that affects the believability of our list is grouping and relationships.
How are the items in this list related?
Bottle
Books
Phone
Headphones
Pens
Rubbish
They're all the kinds of things you might see on a desk or table. Because they all fit within that group (or 'set'), they all seem equally plausible.
What about this list? What's the relationship?
Mask
Onions
Bird
Coins
Hairdresser
There isn't an obvious relationship. Maybe they could all be things that someone had in their room, since they're all relatively small? But that doesn't explain hairdresser.
This lack of a relationship makes this list less believable.
So let's look at the sneaky, half-true list again, and let's assess it for relationship:
Box of brown guacamole left over from yesterday
Jar of peanut butter
Empty kombucha bottles with plants growing out of them
Cardboard box full of white and yellow papers
A post-it note with a computer password written in code
But many office or home workers eat at the desk where they work, or work in the kitchen where they eat.
So it's possible these items could all be in one room?
You can see that this list is deceptive because the items are both detailed and related enough to be plausible.
