“Silliest” Psychology Research
Studies on the physics of wrinkled sheets and the side-effects of sword swallowing were amongst the winners at the 2007 Ig Nobel awards. Prizes are awarded for research that makes you: "laugh and then think". Unfortunately (or fortunately) no wins this year for psychologists, but psychological research has produced pretty weird winners in previous years. Here's the countdown of the 'silliest' research in psychology as judged by the Ig Nobel awards over the past 16 years.
I include my own silliness rating for each study on a five-point Likert scale:
***** = jolly silly.
Missing years had no winners in the psychology category.
1993 - Alien abductions are real
Professor John E. Mack was a Harvard psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who said people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens were not crazy. Along with David M. Jacobs of Temple University, he thought the experience of abductees didn't fit with either psychological or psychiatric models. In fact he believed the abduction stories were true and argued their purpose was the production of children.
1994 - Heavy fines for spitting out gum
The 1994 winner was Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister of Singapore, who carried out a 30-year study into the effects of punishing the citizens of Singapore for chewing or spitting out gum or feeding the pigeons. Stiff fines for both littering and spitting have succeeded in making Singaporeans some of the most litter-conscious citizens in the world.
1995 - Art loving pigeons
Continuing the flying rat theme, in 1995 Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio University won the Ig Nobel for teaching pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Monet and Picasso. When the paintings were upside down, however, they could still spot Picasso's paintings but not Monet's.
2000 - Incompetent people don't know they're incompetent
After the pigeon bonanza, psychology took a back-seat at the Ig Nobels until 2000. Then Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University regained the limelight with their study of incompetent people (PDF, 468k). It seems the incompetent suffer a dual burden: not only are they bereft of talent, they also don't know they are bereft of talent. Their gross over-estimation of their talents then leads them to make ever more stupid decisions. For evidence of this, just turn on your TV to pretty much any channel.
Entertainingly, the study also found that explaining their incompetence to participants actually improved decision-making considerably. So there's a great rationalisation for telling stupid people how stupid they are. Great.
2001 - Gleeful children
This has got to be the sweetest study ever undertaken. Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University carried out an ecological study of glee (abstract) in small groups of preschool children. Even the definition of glee makes me feel happy: "...joyful screaming, laughing, and intense physical acts which occurred in simultaneous bursts or which spread in a contagious fashion from one child to another."
Not only did Sherman find that outbreaks of glee amongst children tended not to disrupt the class, he also found that the optimum number of glee participants was between 7 and 9. Super.
2003 - Voters' uniquely simple decision-making
Gian Vittorio Caprara and colleagues found that when judging which politician to vote for, people only used two dimensions: trustworthiness and energy levels. I suggested this explains why Tony Blair spent the period before the last election running around and talking to 'ordinary' people.
2004 - Inattentional blindness
I'll tell you nothing about this one except that it's the work of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. If you know the experiment where you count the passes of a basketball, skip the video, otherwise click play and concentrate...
Vote now!
So there it is. Apparently the 'silliest' research in psychology. Or is it? What do you think?
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There are some very different sorts of silliness involved here. It is not at all silly to research people's stories about alien abduction. What is silly (or worse) is to be drawn into the delusion onself. I voted for the art loving pigeons as silliest experiment because it seems such a pointless thing to study (although perhaps there is some point I just can't fathom). The Simons & Chabris "Gorillas in our Midst" is funny, but as science it is not silly at all. It is concerned with an important psychological issue, which it highlights in a memorable way. There is something else silly about it, however. Essentially the same experiment, with the same result (although, admittedly, without the funny gorilla - they used a woman with an umbrella instead) had already been published by Neisser and Becklen some 30 years earlier, but it seems hardly anyone thought the phenomenon was interesting back then.
Neisser, U. & Becklen, R. (1975). Selective Looking: Attending to Visually Specified Events. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 480-494.
Hi Nigel, good point, thanks for the reference as well - I'll take a look...
Bummer...the video has been yanked...
Interestingly, the glee study supports the notion that 7-9 humans is the optimal number to maximize conformity, as found in the studies by Asch (if I recall correctly).
There is an on-line journal out there (sadly, now defunct, or more precisely, on hiatus) that had some silliness (and yes, it was peer-reviewed):
http://www.mundanebehavior.org/index2.htm
Lots of fun (if you define fun as "mundane") stuff. I remember what got me hooked on this journal, from their first issue:
"In and Out of Elevators in Japan"
Cheers!
Dr. Grumpus
Dr G., thanks for the heads-up about the video. I'll definitely be having a look at the Journal of Mundane Behaviour! Cool...
I wish Inattentional Blindness was just funny! It actually is a matter of life and death- no less! I believe most car accidents are caused by the wrong belief of involved drivers that they can do more than just "stare at the road ahead". I saw drivers read documents or newspapers at full speed on the highway! Even talking on the speaker-mobilephone is distracting (not tomention holding the mobilephone to one's ear and thus limiting the field-of-view and head movement. Every driver (and pedestrian) should learn about this phenomenon!!
(In memoriam of my friend M.R. )