“Humans will befriend a stick — as long as it moves properly”

Maggie Koerth-Baker profiles, in BoingBoing, the story behind this moving video of how people respond to a stick that moves in ways that seem un-stick-likely. BoingBoing sums it up with the headline “Humans will befriend a stick — as long as it moves properly“:

A 2011 paper, by scientists at the University of Calgary, documenting the experiment, is online.