Cheek preferences on Instagram’s chimpanzee pics [new study]

When people post pictures of chimpanzees to Instagram®, do they have a preference for choosing pictures which display the chimp’s right cheek – or the left cheek? Dr Annukka Lindell, who is a senior lecturer in psychology at the Department of Psychology and Counselling, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia, […]

Correlations: Left-Handers and Right-Wingers (new study)

“It seems axiomatic to assume that handedness is unrelated to actual placement on the political spectrum. Nevertheless, primed by my longstanding research interest in personality and political preference (e.g., McCann, 1997, 2014a, 2014b), I was struck by the rough similarity of a map of the percentage of left-handers in each state in 1986 (McManus, 2009, […]

Does One Armpit Smell Like the Other? (podcast #95)

Does the left armpit smell like the right armpit? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published armpitty study, with dramatic readings from biologist Christina Agapakis, who has smelled more armpits, mostly for scientific reasons, than most […]

The world’s first “Pastarimeter” — lefty pasta and righty pasta

“Our experience of explaining polarimetry to the general public is that they frequently ask how molecules rotate light, which is difficult to explain using non-technical language. Therefore we were keen to find an analogous large scale system which mimicked the polarimeter and used everyday left- and right-handed objects.” – explain Claire Saxon, Scott Brindley, Nic […]

The origin of the Eiffel Tower and leaning to the left

Rolf Zwaan [pictured here], writing in his blog, explains how his (and colleagues’) Ig Nobel Prize-winning study, “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,” came about: In a previous post I alluded to the fact that I had produced an amusing title a few years ago for an article that was published in Psychological Science (it was intended as […]