Voodoo dolls, the Ig Nobel Prize and why headlines matter in academia

Here’s a voodoo-doll-rich, behind-the-scenes account what happened before and after a researcher (and her team) won an Ig Nobel Prize. Elsevier Connects reports: Voodoo dolls, the Ig Nobel Prize and why headlines matter in academia How psychologist Dr. Lindie Liang captured the world’s attention with her research By Lucy Goodchild van Hilten Many researchers have a […]

Retaliation on a voodoo doll (symbolizing an abusive supervisor) restores justice [new study]

Mistreated by a supervisor at work? Would it make you feel a little bit better if you could, say, torment a voodoo doll? Professor Lindie Hanyu Liang (at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) and colleagues have investigated such things. In return for a $1 payment, 195 full-time employees […]

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 […]