History of the Dunmow Flitch of Bacon Custom, a book by William Andrews, published in 1877, tells of the British custom involving married couples publicly swearing an oath about themselves, in pursuit of free bacon. “The Dunmow Flitch: bringing home the bacon,” written more recently, by a mildly-anonymous someone else, also tells some history of the […]
Tag: married
Using Voodoo Dolls to Measure Aggression in Married Couples (podcast #98)
Are voodoo dolls and low blood sugar helpful for understanding why married couples squabble? 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 voodoo-doll-utilizing study (the very study that made the word “hangry” fairly famous). Tufts University biomedical researcher Dany […]
The usefulness of voodoo dolls in studying blood sugar and aggession
The Associated Press tells of the new study by Ig Nobel Prize (for the study “‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive“) winner Brad Bushman [pictured here] and colleagues: The researchers studied 107 married couples for three weeks. Each night, they measured […]
Simple complex thought: Sex-attraction examples
Great thinkers think complex thoughts, according to one simple line of reasoning. Here’s are two related studies. Alone and together, they demonstrate some surprising, and surprisingly complex, thinking. The first study [via NCBI ROFL] is: “The best men are (not always) already taken: female preference for single versus attached males depends on conception risk,” Paola Bressan [pictured […]