The personality of rocks at the Bergamo, Italy, Science Pre-Festival

The Bergamo Science Festival this year has a pre-festival which includes: “a competition created in collaboration with the Caffi Museum, dedicated to rocks and minerals and conducted on the BergamoScienza Instagram profile. Two rocks will be presented by a geologist each week. The aim is to reproduce the study that won the IgNobel prize for […]

Not Only Assholes Drive Mercedes [research study]

Evidence suggests that one can accurately judge a person by seeing what kind of car the person drives, at least in Finland, suggests a new study. The study is: “Not Only Assholes Drive Mercedes. Besides Disagreeable Men, Also Conscientious People Drive High‐Status Cars,” Jan Erik Lönnqvist, Ville‐Juhani Ilmarinen, and Sointu Leikas, International Journal of Psychology, […]

Cat Owners’ Personalities, and Satisfaction With Their Cats [research study]

Evidence mounts about what kinds of cat owners are satisfied with their cats. This new study explains: “The Purrfect Match: The Influence of Personality on Owner Satisfaction with Their Domestic Cat (Felis silvestris catus),” Rebecca Evans, Minna Lyons, Gayle Brewer, Sonia Tucci, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 138, 2019, pp. 252–256. The authors (one of […]

Interview with personality-of-rocks Ig Nobel Prize winner Shelagh Ferguson

The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective. They documented their research in the study “The Brand Personality of Rocks: A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale,” Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh […]

“Free personality tests are more reliable and efficient than the paid variety”

BPS Research Digest reports: Free personality tests are more reliable and efficient than the paid variety In most areas of life, we expect the free versions of products to be sub-standard compared with the “premium” paid-for versions. After all, why would anyone pay for something if the free equivalent were better? However, a new study […]

Spiraling difficulty of reliably interpreting scans of people’s brains

This new study suggests that some people’s personalities make it more difficult to get accurate MRI (and fMRI) pictures of their heads: “Individual Differences in Impulsivity Predict Head Motion during Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” Kong X-z, Zhen Z, Li X, Lu H-h, Wang R, et al., (2014) PLoS ONE, 9(8): e104989. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104989. The authors are at Beijing […]

Assessing the Perceived Personalities of Rocks

Of these three rocks, which would you say is the most ‘confident’ ? How about the most ‘sincere’ or ‘intelligent’? Just such questions were asked in a recent study by Dr. Mark Avis (Massey University, New Zealand), Dr. Sarah Forbes (University of Birmingham, UK) and Dr. Shelagh Ferguson (University of Otago, New Zealand). Their study […]