This increase has taken about ten years. Projected forward, the results suggest that by 2021 people will be covering the same distance in almost no time at all. By 2040, they will arrive at their destinations several seconds
before
they set off. Looked at from the perspective of Milgram’s “sensory overload” hypothesis (described in chapter 6), the findings suggest that people in these cities are likely to be less caring, more focused on what matters to them, and more isolated from one another than ever before. Given the important role that these factors play in creating caring communities, some might argue that city dwellers worldwide are now moving faster than the speed of life. It is a chilling thought, especially since the recent United Nations report
State of the World’s Cities 2006/7
concluded that, for the first time in history, more people are now living in cities than in the countryside.
After completing my Dublin measurements, I closed my notebook, walked away from the General Post Office (at 5.45 feet per second), and reflected on twenty-one years of examining the quirky side of life. In addition to diverse topics such as testing the lie-detection skills of nations and uncovering the psychology of pick-up lines and personal ads, it has produced many wonderful and highly memorable times, including nights spent in apparently haunted houses, performing unfunny stand-up routines in comedy clubs, having my doctoral students dress as giant chickens, watching a four-year-old child beat the stock market, and feeling the heat emanate from a sixty-foot bed of white-hot coals (we didn’t measure the speed of walking during that study, but I suspect it would have made Dubliners look slow).
But no scientific work exists in a vacuum. My research has built upon studies conducted by academics who have also dared to explore the backwaters of human behavior—researchers who have suffered for their science by secreting themselves in supermarkets and bowling alleys, applying voltages to the corpses of murderers, stalling cars at traffic lights, and spending countless hours trawling through millions of death records. Together, quirkologists have given us important insights into many areas of psychology, including deception, superstition, and altruism. Such work has also helped uncover the secret psychology that underlies our everyday lives and, in doing so, has illustrated just how fascinating those everyday lives
really
are. Or as Arthur Conan Doyle so eloquently put it in his book
Study in Scarlet:
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind of man could invent.”
For more than a hundred years, a small group of highly dedicated researchers have been studying people like you. To date, their work has only scratched the surface of the fascinating phenomenon that is your life. My hope is that this book will help quirkology move from the margins to the mainstream, and that studying the unusual will become surprisingly commonplace. I hope that my fellow academics will be encouraged to carry out more work that is both interesting and unusual; that they will, for instance, discover whether blondes
really
do have more fun, why we daydream, the relationship between personality and a person’s choice of cell phone ringtone, why some people are more likeable than others, whether ventriloquists have multiple personalities, whether wearing school uniforms makes children less creative, and why we cry when we are happy. In short, I dream of a world packed full of researchers examining the more offbeat, and quirky, aspects of life. Next time someone stops you in the street and asks for the correct time, or you are stuck behind a car that has just stalled at a traffic light, or you find a $20 bill on the ground, beware. There may be far more going on than you suspect.
AFTERWORD
How to Pep Up the Dullest of Dinner Parties
S
urveys show that 87 percent of the population suffer from the entirely rational fear of being trapped in dull conversations at dinner parties.
1
To help alleviate such suffering, I recently held a series of “experimental” dinner parties. Before being allowed access to food, each of my guests had to rate a long list of factoids derived from the studies described in this book, on a scale of 1 (“Whatever”) to 5 (“Really? When does it come out in paperback?”). I then used the data to identify the factoids that were most likely to provoke good conversation at even the dullest of gatherings.
Here are the factoids that took tenth place upward:
10th: People asked to write down a few words describing a university professor subsequently answer more Trivial Pursuit questions correctly than those describing a soccer hooligan.
9th: Women’s personal ads would attract more replies if they were written by a man. The opposite is not true of men’s ads.
8th: The
Mona Lisa
seems enigmatic because Leonardo da Vinci painted her so that her smile appears more striking when people look at her eyes than at her mouth.
7th: Women van drivers are more likely than others to take more than ten items through the express lane in a supermarket, to break speed limits, and to park in restricted areas. (This one proved especially popular with women.)
6th: Some seemingly ghostly experiences, such as feeling an odd sense of presence, are actually due to low-frequency sound waves produced by the wind blowing across an open window. (This received the top score from men.)
5th: Words containing the
k
sound—such as duck, quack, and Krusty the Clown—are especially likely to make people laugh.
4th: People born during the summer are luckier than those born in the winter—temperature differences around the time of birth make summer-borns more optimistic and open to opportunities.
In third place came work relating to the language of lying:
3rd: The best way of detecting a lie is to listen rather than look—liars say less, give fewer details, and use the word “I” less than people telling the truth.
The factoid that was placed second continued the deception theme and was all about fake smiles:
2nd: The difference between a genuine and a fake smile is all in the eyes—in a genuine smile, the skin around the eyes crinkles; in a fake smile it remains much flatter.
The number one factoid was that curious fact about sweater-wearing and dog feces:
1st: People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog feces and not washed than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer.
So, next time you go to a dinner party, arm yourself with one or more of these scientifically proven ways of creating interesting conversation. Together, we can terminate tedious talk and pep up the dullest of evenings.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has its roots in a chance conversation with science writer and
Scientific American
columnist Michael Shermer. In November 2005, Michael kindly arranged for me to speak at the
California Institute of Technology
. While chatting on the way back to my hotel, the idea of my writing a book about my unusual experiments in psychology emerged. Thank you Michael. Without that conversation, this book might never have happened.
Various organizations have funded and helped carry out many of the studies described here. First and foremost, I wish to thank the University of Hertfordshire for supporting my work over the years. I would like to thank Sue Hordijenko, Jill Nelson, Nick Hillier, Craig Brierley, and Paul Briggs from The British Association for the Advancement of Science for their invaluable work during the financial astrology experiment and LaughLab. My thanks also to Simon Gage, Tracy Foster, and Pauline Mullin from The Edinburgh International Science Festival for helping to stage Born Lucky and for conducting the studies exploring the science of smiling and speed dating. Thanks also to Katie Smith and the team from the Cheltenham Festival of Science for helping to arrange the small world study. Similarly, my thanks to Karen Hartshorn, director of The New Zealand International Science Festival, for helping to conduct Born Lucky 2 and for arranging the smiling exhibition-experiment at The Dunedin Public Art Gallery. My thanks to The British Council for funding my trip to New Zealand and to Felicity Connell for doing such a wonderful job of looking after me while I was there. I would also like to thank Michael White from The British Council for organizing the global pace of life study and to the teams of researchers who found the time to measure the speed of walking around the world.
Much of the work described here has involved the media, and I have been lucky enough to work with several talented journalists and programme makers over the years. My thanks to Penny Park and Jay Ingram from
The Daily Planet
for collaborating on so many studies and for persuading my childhood hero, Leslie Nielsen, to participate in one of our experiments. Also, thanks to John Zaritsky and the team for creating many happy memories when we filmed the
No Kidding
documentary on LaughLab, and Isobel Williams from Bite Yer Legs for the surreal experience of watching people offer to pay several pounds for a worthless brass curtain ring. Special thanks are due to Roger Highfield, Science Editor of
The Daily Telegraph
, and writer Simon Singh. Roger, thank you for introducing me to the heady world of science communication and for turning so many of my ideas into reality. As you remind me every time we meet, without you I would be nothing. Simon, thank you for making such a great job of the experiment with Sir Robin Day and for your invaluable advice and expertise over the years. Without you, Roger would be nothing.
Thanks are also due to my colleagues and collaborators. To Matthew Smith, who carried out the lottery experiment and spent lots of time doing secret stuff in the dark during fake séances. To Emma Greening, for sending out all those parcels in the small world study, ghost hunting, exploring the psychology of suggestion, vetting thousands of jokes, and still finding the energy to laugh. To Sarah Woods, for having her brain scanned, measuring the pace of life in London, and not taking the LaughLab blonde jokes personally. To Ciarán O’Keeffe, for dressing up as a giant chicken and for exploring some of Britain’s least haunted locations with me. To Adrian Owen, for helping out with brain scanning and finding the origin of the world’s funniest joke. To all of the Infrasonic team (Sarah Angliss, Ciarán O’Keeffe, Richard Lord, Dan Simmon, and GéNIA) for managing to have such a good time while carrying out a study that has inspired so many. To Jim Houran and Jayanti Chotai, for sharing your invaluable expertise on ghostly experiences, speed dating, and chronopsychology. To Karen, for helping with the speed-dating experiment and for allowing us to use your photograph on the cover of the book. To Peter, for allowing me to reproduce your wonderfully instructive fake and genuine smiles. To Brian Fischbacher, for taking such great photographs of Karen and Peter. To Clive Jeffries, for spending so much time in the dark during the séance studies and for providing such insightful feedback on the book. And to Andy Nyman, for doing such a convincing job of talking to the dead and for making me laugh so much—you deserve any success that may eventually come your way.
This book would not have been possible without the guidance and expertise of my agents Patrick Walsh and Emma Parry, and editors Jason Cooper, Richard Milner, and Joann Miller.
Special thanks also to my wonderful colleague, and collaborator, Caroline Watt. You have helped design and conduct almost all the studies described here, provided much-needed support when the going got tough, and given far beyond the call of duty. Thank you.
Finally, my thanks to the researchers who have carried out the hundreds of slightly strange studies described here, and the millions of participants who have contributed to this work. Without you, the book would have been completely different, and much shorter.
NOTES
1
M. Brookes,
Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton
(London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
2
F. Galton, “Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer,”
Fortnightly Review
68 (1872): 125-135.
3
F. Galton,
The Art of Travel
(London: John Murray, 1855), 209.
4
I. Farkas, D. Helbing, and T. Vicsek, “Mexican Waves in an Excitable Medium,”
Nature
419 (2002): 131-132.
5
L. Standing, “Learning 10,000 Pictures,”
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
25 (1973): 207-222.
6
R. Sommer, “The Personality of Vegetables: Botanical Metaphors for Human Characteristics,”
Journal of Personality
56, no. 4 (1988): 665-683.