If you want to arm yourself with fun facts before attending a dinner party to ensure lively conversation, Quirkology: How we discover big truths in small things by Richard Wiseman might be a delightful choice. It is of the academic lite variety that uses very simple/accessible prose any high school child can easily read. Author, who is a professor in UK, discusses tons and tons of social, behavioral experiments scientists have conducted allover the world to answer unusual questions, with the author himself being one of those researchers.
It starts off asking the readers to write an imaginary Q on their forehead with their index finger. Later the author reveals that those who wrote the Q such a way that the little line at the bottom reaches the right eyebrow (i.e. they can read the Q themselves correctly) is a bit more self-centered introverts who are not good liers while those took it to their left eye brow (i.e. Q looks correct to others looking at them) is more open, concerned about others and are better liers! Author talks about a range of experiments of this kind that measure or try to understand a lot of quirkiness embedded in the behavior of human beings. This includes figuring out how many people it takes to start a Mexican wave in a football stadium, perceived personality traits of fruits and vegetable (lemons are seen as dislikable, onions as stupid, etc.), discovering that the children’s drawing of Santa Clause grow larger in the build-up to Christmas Day and shrink in January and so forth! The quote at the beginning saying “What is the use of such a study? The criticism implied in this question has never bothered me, for any activity seems to be of value if it satisfied curiosity, stimulates ideas, and gives a new slant to our understanding of the social world” by Stanley Milgram. Fair enough.
It is written mostly like a report of a series of experiments conducted to understand such quirkiness. Some things I would have figured impossible to measure have lead to some serious large scale testing. A good example is determining what is the world’s funniest joke. How would you go about designing an objective experiment for this? Wiseman setup a website, got enough publicity and asked people to contribute jokes and rate the ones on the site. He eventually got a collection of about 40,000 jokes and 1.5 million ratings. You can still visit this site to read jokes and look at several fun facts related to creating jokes here (length of funniest jokes are 103 words, if you want to tell an animal joke, make it a duck). Though it is an interesting experiment that got a Guinness record citation and a lot of attention, despite presenting most liked joke in US and outside US, it still concluded that there may not be just one joke that is the funniest but what makes people laugh is quite subjective. Still I liked the scientific approach/analysis to this question that resulted in a lot of interesting insights. One insight obtained via brain scans is that the left hemisphere sets up the initial context for the joke and then a small area in the right provides the skill needed to appreciate the punch line! So, patients who have had some damage to their right hemisphere are not able to understand jokes well and don’t see the funny side of life much. Example is this joke. A man goes up to a lady to ask “Excuse me, Have you seen a policeman around?”, the lady says no. Then three potential punch lines are provided to the listener asking them to choose one they consider will make a good joke:
1. OK, give me your watch and necklace then..
2. OK, it is just that I have been looking for one for half an hour.
3. Baseball is my favorite sport.
People with right hemisphere brain damage choose 3 since they don’t get the joke implied in 1 but understand the "punch line grammar" that it should be quite different from the setup!
There were really interesting studies related to circadian rhythms (a scientist who had to live 375 feet underground for two months did it without clocks/access to sunlight and thought only 34 days had passed!), how people born in the summer are luckier, effects of tax rate on people's date of birth/death, psychology of magic/seance room, decision making (people will go home and come back next day to avail a sale to save $15 if the product costs $20 but won't if it is a $2000 product), effects of people's name in their career, factors governing tipping/donations, racism, female van drivers being the ones taking more than 10 items through the "10 items or less" line in the grocery store and many more.
One very simple study conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram involved dropping hundreds of postage paid envelopes addressed to "Friends of the Nazi Party" or "Friends of Children's Hospital" on the first line with everything else remaining the same. Whoever finds it may drop it off in the mail box or throw it in trash. Counting how many envelopes got mailed and how many didn't, gave an indication of how people felt about Nazi party and Children's hospital in that town. This turned out to be a very effective way of taking a poll rather than asking people the same question that produced unreliable results. This technique is still used today to decipher how people feel about Gays & Lesbians, Arab-Israeli issues, Bill Clinton's impeachment and so on all over the world. Quite neat.
The author himself acknowledges how useful these factoids will be to liven a dinner party and lists the 10 best items from his list. The best one? People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog feces and not washed than one that has been dry cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer!! :-)
Give it a whirl.
-sundar.
It starts off asking the readers to write an imaginary Q on their forehead with their index finger. Later the author reveals that those who wrote the Q such a way that the little line at the bottom reaches the right eyebrow (i.e. they can read the Q themselves correctly) is a bit more self-centered introverts who are not good liers while those took it to their left eye brow (i.e. Q looks correct to others looking at them) is more open, concerned about others and are better liers! Author talks about a range of experiments of this kind that measure or try to understand a lot of quirkiness embedded in the behavior of human beings. This includes figuring out how many people it takes to start a Mexican wave in a football stadium, perceived personality traits of fruits and vegetable (lemons are seen as dislikable, onions as stupid, etc.), discovering that the children’s drawing of Santa Clause grow larger in the build-up to Christmas Day and shrink in January and so forth! The quote at the beginning saying “What is the use of such a study? The criticism implied in this question has never bothered me, for any activity seems to be of value if it satisfied curiosity, stimulates ideas, and gives a new slant to our understanding of the social world” by Stanley Milgram. Fair enough.
It is written mostly like a report of a series of experiments conducted to understand such quirkiness. Some things I would have figured impossible to measure have lead to some serious large scale testing. A good example is determining what is the world’s funniest joke. How would you go about designing an objective experiment for this? Wiseman setup a website, got enough publicity and asked people to contribute jokes and rate the ones on the site. He eventually got a collection of about 40,000 jokes and 1.5 million ratings. You can still visit this site to read jokes and look at several fun facts related to creating jokes here (length of funniest jokes are 103 words, if you want to tell an animal joke, make it a duck). Though it is an interesting experiment that got a Guinness record citation and a lot of attention, despite presenting most liked joke in US and outside US, it still concluded that there may not be just one joke that is the funniest but what makes people laugh is quite subjective. Still I liked the scientific approach/analysis to this question that resulted in a lot of interesting insights. One insight obtained via brain scans is that the left hemisphere sets up the initial context for the joke and then a small area in the right provides the skill needed to appreciate the punch line! So, patients who have had some damage to their right hemisphere are not able to understand jokes well and don’t see the funny side of life much. Example is this joke. A man goes up to a lady to ask “Excuse me, Have you seen a policeman around?”, the lady says no. Then three potential punch lines are provided to the listener asking them to choose one they consider will make a good joke:
1. OK, give me your watch and necklace then..
2. OK, it is just that I have been looking for one for half an hour.
3. Baseball is my favorite sport.
People with right hemisphere brain damage choose 3 since they don’t get the joke implied in 1 but understand the "punch line grammar" that it should be quite different from the setup!
There were really interesting studies related to circadian rhythms (a scientist who had to live 375 feet underground for two months did it without clocks/access to sunlight and thought only 34 days had passed!), how people born in the summer are luckier, effects of tax rate on people's date of birth/death, psychology of magic/seance room, decision making (people will go home and come back next day to avail a sale to save $15 if the product costs $20 but won't if it is a $2000 product), effects of people's name in their career, factors governing tipping/donations, racism, female van drivers being the ones taking more than 10 items through the "10 items or less" line in the grocery store and many more.
One very simple study conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram involved dropping hundreds of postage paid envelopes addressed to "Friends of the Nazi Party" or "Friends of Children's Hospital" on the first line with everything else remaining the same. Whoever finds it may drop it off in the mail box or throw it in trash. Counting how many envelopes got mailed and how many didn't, gave an indication of how people felt about Nazi party and Children's hospital in that town. This turned out to be a very effective way of taking a poll rather than asking people the same question that produced unreliable results. This technique is still used today to decipher how people feel about Gays & Lesbians, Arab-Israeli issues, Bill Clinton's impeachment and so on all over the world. Quite neat.
The author himself acknowledges how useful these factoids will be to liven a dinner party and lists the 10 best items from his list. The best one? People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog feces and not washed than one that has been dry cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer!! :-)
Give it a whirl.
-sundar.
