Improbable Research

A new paper is the first (by other authors) to cite the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize-winning paper by Richard Stephens, et al., about how swearing relieves physical pain. The new study is:

“Naturalistically observed swearing, emotional support, and depressive symptoms in women coping with illness,” Megan L Robbins, Elizabeth S Focella, Shelley Kasle, Ana María López, Karen L Weihs, Matthias R Mehl [pictured here], Health Psychology, Vol 30(6), Nov 2011, 789-792. The authors write:

Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the intra- and interpersonal consequences of swearing. Specifically, it investigated what implications swearing has for coping with and adjustment to illness.

Methods: …Participants wore the Electronically Activated Recorder, an unobtrusive observation sampling method that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds, on weekends to track spontaneous swearing in their daily interactions, and completed self-reported measures of depressive symptoms and emotional support.

Conclusion: [Our] exploratory results are consistent with the notion that swearing can sometimes repel emotional support at the expense of psychological adjustment.

BONUS: Richard Stephens, swearing, pain, Stephen Fry, and Brian Blessed, all together on the BBC discussing and demonstrating how swearing relieves pain.

The GEL Conference, in New York City, has just posted video of the talk I did there. This was the conference’s concluding talk:

Jennifer Ouellette looks deep into the sword-swallowing and medical adventures of Ig Nobel Prize winner Dan Meyer, in her essay in Cocktail Party Physics. She begins:

By the Sword: The Science of Sword-Swallowing

A couple of weeks ago, new media mogul Arianna Huffington had an unusual experience: assisting veteran sword swallower Dan Meyer, who was visiting the Huffington Post headquarters in New York City.Meyer heads the Sword Swallowers Association International, based in Antioch, Tennessee. He’s a five-time Guiness Book of World Record Holder, and has appeared on America’s Got Talent. He made it to the finals despite having a visibly squicked-out David Hasselhoff pull the plug halfway through Meyer’s audition performance.

But we’re sure he’s most proud of his 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, which he shared with Brian Witcombe, a consulting radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust in England. They were honored “for their penetrating medical report, ‘Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,’” which was published to almost no fanfare in the British Medical Journal — maybe because it appeared right around Christmas and people were too busy swallowing Yorkshire pudding and opening prezzies to pay much attention to the findings….

BONUS: The photo below, taken at the 2007 ceremony, Dan Meyer punctuating his and Brian Witcombe’s joint one-minute-long acceptance speech. Meyer and Dr. Witcombe (who is not visible in this photo, having stepped back to give his colleague breathing room) were honored for studying the medical side-effects of sword-swallowing. Nobel Laureates William Lipscomb, Robert Laughlin and Dudley Herschbach can be seen here analyzing Mr. Meyer’s speech. Photo Credit: Alexey Eliseev.

RAI-3′s Telecamere program interviewed the three random-promotion researchers. Here is the full, glorious interview, in Italian:

The trio — Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy — were awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in management for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

Their published study (which they followed up with others) is: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

BONUS: The researchers will be part of the upcoming Ig Nobel Tour of Scandinavia, in March.

Politicians are too simple.

Two Ig Nobel Prize winners — both, as it happens, professors at Stanford University — each gives part of the explanation. (As with many simple facts, the explanation is a bit complex.)

Politicians’ simple debates

Professor John Perry, a philosopher, looked at politicians’ televised debates. In an essay for the New York Times (on January 21, 2012), he writes:

Needed: More Political Dimensions

One dimension — left to right — doesn’t suffice to deal with today’s political reality…. We seem to need at least three dimensions… The system I suggest is no doubt quite deficient. But it is not, as the current left-to-right system clearly is, ridiculously deficient. [FOR DETAILS, SEE HIS ENTIRE ESSAY]

(Professor Perry was awarded the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.)

Politicians’ simple personalities

Professor Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist — yes, he is the Zimbardo of the famous Stanford prison experiment — looked at politicians’ personalities.

Zimbardo shared, with Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. They were honored for their report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities” (published in Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493). They write:

Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities

The complexity of human personality has been reduced to five dimensions, based on factor analyses of judgements of personality traits. Many researchers agree that a five-factor model of personality captures the essential features of all traits that are used to describe personality: energy/ extroversion; agreeableness/friendliness; conscientiousness; emotional stability against neuroticism; and intellect/openness to experience.

But we show here that this common, standard set of five factors does not hold for judgements of famous politicalfigures. We found that, when people judge the personality traits of politicians, they use only two or three factors….

[NOTE: One of the politicians they studied was Silvio Berlusconi, who recently became an ex-politician.]