Improbable Research

Researchers, many of them, count and measure things. Here is an example:

“Are Christian/religious people poor tippers?” Michael Lynn [pictured here] and Benjamin Katz, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 43, Issue 5, May 2013, pp. 928–935. (Thanks to investigator Dan Griliopoulos for bringing this to our attention.)

The authors, at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and at HCD Research, respectively, explain:

“A web-based survey was used to assess the relationships of religious faith and frequency of church attendance with tipping under conditions of good and bad service. Results indicated that Jews and those with no religion tipped more than Christians and members of other religions, but that the vast majority of Christians tipped at or above the normative 15% of bill size. Worship frequency also significantly interacted with service quality such that the tips of those who frequently worship vary with service quality less than the tips of those who worship less frequently. The practical implications of these results for service workers and restaurants or other service businesses with a large religious clientele are discussed.”

Here’s detail from the study:

BONUS (unrelated): A study co-authored by Charity and Faith:

“Study protocol for promoting respectful maternity care initiative to assess, measure and design interventions to reduce disrespect and abuse during childbirth in Kenya,” Charity Ndwiga, Faith Mbehero, et al., BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2013, 13:21.

The special Blushing issue (vol. 19, no. 2) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now out!

Articles include “Blushing in the Dark: First Experimental Proof“, “Blushing Research Review”, “Blushing in the Dark: First Experimental Proof”, and more, more, more, including new helpings of “Medical Research Review“, “Boys Will Be Boys”, “Soft Is Hard”, and other outstandingly improbable research snippets from many fields and countries.

Mel (right) says it’s swell.

Click on the Mel’s face to see the table of contents, buy the e-book version (first download a free preview of it, if you like!), or subscribe to the paper version.

Imagine that you are employed as a professional field sniffer. That is, a person who has the job of attempting to identify and quantify odours, quite literally in the field. Think: agricultural, industrial and natural. But there is an inherent problem  – however keen your olfactory expertise, when you’re immersed in problematic stinky air, where can you get a breath of fresh air to compare it to? A method was suggested in 2003 via US patent 6595037

“Typically, in operation, after doing whatever is necessary to make sure that there are no lingering odors within cartridge or mask, the user with nose mask placed snugly over his or her nose moves or rotates disk so that the aperture containing the smallest orifice, and, correspondingly the thinnest insert, is in position opposite the inlet opening of barrel and sniffs to draw air into the nostrils. The operator normally takes a number of sniffs and exhales each one to make sure that a suitable sample of a mixture of odor-free and odorous air is being inhaled into the nostrils.“

The patent was shortly to be capitalised-on with the production of the Nasal Ranger ®. Of course the accuracy of the final results still depends very much on the olfactory skills of the sniffer, but the Nasal Ranger ®, say the manufacturers :

“… can be used as a proactive monitoring or enforcement tool for confident odor measurement at property lines and in the neighboring community”

Notes: The nose hugging ‘comfort seal’ comes in two sizes – narrow and wide.

Photo showing Nasal Rangers ® in action is courtesy of the University of Idaho.

What does one learn from reading about economics experiments? This:

Johannes Abeler

“Self-Selection into Economics Experiments Is Driven by Monetary Rewards,” Johannes Abeler [University of Oxford, IZA and CESifo] and Daniele Nosenzo [University of Nottingham], IZA [Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit / Institute for the Study of Labor] DP No. 7374, April 2013. The researchers explain:

“Laboratory experiments have become a wide-spread tool in economic research. Yet, there is still doubt about how well the results from lab experiments generalize to other settings. In this paper, we investigate the self-selection process of potential subjects into the subject pool. We alter the recruitment email sent to first-year students, either mentioning the monetary reward associated with participation in experiments; or appealing to the importance of helping research; or both. We find that the sign-up rate drops by two-thirds if we do not mention monetary rewards. Appealing to subjects’ willingness to help research has no effect on signup. We then invite the so-recruited subjects to the laboratory to measure a range of preferences in incentivized experiments. We do not find any differences between the three groups. Our results show that student subjects participate in experiments foremost to earn money, and that it is therefore unlikely that this selection leads to an over-estimation of social preferences in the student population.”

(Thanks to investigator Dan Vergano for bringing this to our attention, and for supplying the headline.)

Dan Dennett writes, in his new book, Intuition Pumps, which is extracted in The Observer:

“I am amazed at how many really smart people don’t understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes.

“Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.”

BONUS, from the same source, and maybe —or maybe not — feeling ironic, given where you are reading this: