Improbable Research

Which body parts do students pay attention to when they size up their rivals in romance? Pieternel Dijkstra and Bram Buunk went to a university library to find the answer. They handed out survey forms to students who were there studying books or studying each others’ body parts.

A monograph called Sex Differences in the Jealousy-Evoking Nature of a Rival’s Body Build, published in 2001 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, tells what Dijkstra and Buunk learned from this endeavour. The two psychologists, based at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, begin by summarising the state of knowledge in their field. Everyone’s ultimate goal: clear up the mysteries of romantic rivalry and jealousy….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

A smiley-face is very expressive, statistically. By tweaking the eyes, mouth and other bits, you can literally put a meaningful face on any jumble of numbers. Herman Chernoff pointed this out in 1973 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, in a monograph called The Use of Faces to ­Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space ­Graphically.

Subsequently, folks took to calling these things Chernoff faces. Chernoff faces can make statistical analysis into a recognisably human activity. Most people, when shown some statistics, sigh and get boggled. But Chernoff realised that almost everyone is good at reading faces. So he devised recipes to convert any set of statistics into an equivalent bunch of smiley-face drawings….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Expletives of Lower Working-Class Women, published in 1992 in the journal Language in Society, is a rare sociolinguistic study of this inherently provocative topic. “This article,” wrote author Susan Hughes of the University of Salford, “sets out to look at the reality of the swearing used by a group of women from a deprived inner-city area.” Hughes surveyed six women in Ordsall, a part of Salford said to be characterised by “social malaise”.

“My observations of these women,” Hughes wrote, “showed me that, contrary to some theories, they use a strong vernacular style … These women are proud of their swearing…”

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Angelika Richter and Lori Zonner have a funny way of captivating readers. In a study called Clowning – An Opportunity for Ministry they write: “Experiences over five years interacting with patients as the clown Jingles and the experiment and experience of one afternoon as the clown Hairie in a hospital led the authors to reflect on the deeper meaning of clowns … Before sharing further experiences with clowning in ministry, and telling about one afternoon when Jingles and Hairie were on their way through the hospital, let us first describe a common meaning of clowning.”

Richter, a chaplain and minister at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, and her colleague Zonner published their monograph in 1996 in The Journal of Religion and Health….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

In 1966, hair combing made noise on both sides of the Atlantic – musical noise to the east, scientific to the west.

In England, the Beatles released a song that said: “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”. In America, William C Waggoner and George V Scott of the Colgate-Palmolive Company published a monograph explaining how they had measured, with a fair degree of precision, the sound of a comb being dragged through a hank of hair….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

In this hand-sanitiser-obsessed era, Professor John Trinkaus, a man who studies things that annoy him, got annoyed. This resulted, inevitably, in a study called Hand Sanitising: An Informal Look.Trinkaus saw people being urged “to frequently wash their hands, or otherwise sanitise their hands, as a precaution against the flu”. But, he wondered, to what extent did the public respond to this hoopla? The answer apparently is: not much….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.