For the sake of clarity, Pendry and Carrick embedded words within each photograph: either ‘Norman, who is an accountant’ or ‘Norman, who is a punk rocker’.
The dupe being thus properly set up, he or she was then crammed into a room with three non-dupes and an authority figure. The authority figure played a tape recording full of beeps, first asking everyone to (1) pay attention and (2) carefully count the beeps. After the playing of the beep-filled tape came the moment of truth ... or the moment of conformity.
The authority figure asked each of the confederates how many beeps they’d heard. Each of these co-conspirers gave a pre-arranged – and wrong – total.
Now, at long last, the innocent dupe had to speak up. How many beeps had she or he heard?
The innocent dupes who had seen the photo of an accountant fudged their answer. They acquiesced to what everyone else said. The dupes who had looked at a punk rocker did not.
Like many studies, this one builds on an existing foundation. Pendry and Carrick acknowledge owing much to a 1996 New York University study about innocent dupes who were shown a list of words about elderly people. The words included old, lonely, grey, retired, wrinkle, ancient, and cautious. The scientists, armed with a stopwatch, discovered that dupes who had seen those words walked away more slowly than dupes who had not.
Pendry, Louise, and Rachael Carrick (2001). ‘Doing What the Mob Do: Priming Effects on Conformity.’ European Journal of Social Psychology 31: 83–92.
Bargh, John, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows (1996). ‘Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (2): 230–44.
Ministry of Clowns
Angelika Richter and Lori Zonner have a funny way of captivating readers. In a study called ‘Clowning: An Opportunity for Ministry’ they write: ‘Experiences over five years interacting with patients as the clown Jingles and the experiment and experience of one afternoon as the clown Hairie in a hospital led the authors to reflect on the deeper meaning of clowns ... Before sharing further experiences with clowning in ministry, and telling about one afternoon when Jingles and Hairie were on their way through the hospital, let us first describe a common meaning of clowning.’
Richter, a chaplain and minister at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, and her colleague Zonner published their monograph in 1996 in the Journal of Religion and Health.
Clowning, as commonly recognized, is for them just a beginning. Richter and Zonner explain that ‘the clown is recognized universally as a symbol of happiness and creates smiles and laughter. The clown ministry, however, is not just entertainment, nor is it preaching in a costume.’
Looking beyond that research, one sees that clowning ministry is often confined to hospitals, but not to any one country. In Scotland, Olive Fleming Drane of Aberdeenshire proudly administers the yuks. In England, Roly Bain of Bristol is the most prominent of this variety of spiritual clown. The US is bursting with clowns of a ministerial turn.
For anyone wishing to be initiated, resources abound.
Janet Litherland’s book The Clown Ministry Handbook, published in 1982, offers something of a one-stop education. The table of contents lays out the basics: ‘An overview of the activities of clowns throughout history’; ‘The “where” and “how” of clown ministry’; ‘How to entertain an audience by making a wide variety of objects from balloons’; and more. The final chapter crowns it: ‘Eleven clown ministers tell how they came to be clowns for Christ’.
A website called ClownMinistry.com gives clown ministry info and instruction, and sells clown ministry paraphernalia ranging from The Clown Ministry Handbook to Three Stooges golf ornaments. The day I visited, the site featured a sponsored link to MyGunSpot, a ‘social networking site for gun owners’.
However, not everyone loves a clown, even a worshipful clown. And sometimes, clownish optimism meets donnish discouragement.
Linda Miller Van Blerkom, of Drew University in New Jersey, published a study in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, where she cautioned that: ‘small children are frequently afraid of clowns, whose bizarre appearance suggests the dangers of the unknown and uncanny, and whose performances dramatize common childhood fears’.
To clown-lovers, Miller Van Blerkom’s work may sound flat, lifeless, sterile. But the Economic and Social Research Council warned in 2007 that even two-dimensional artwork of clowns, affixed to a wall of a hospital, can be problematic. Citing research performed by Penny Curtis of the University of Sheffield (and which it sponsored), the council issued an alert to hospitals, in 2007, with the headline ‘Children’s Wards – Don’t Send in the Clowns’. The most chilling detail: ‘All children disliked the use of clowns in the décor, with even the oldest children seeing them as scary.’
Richter, Angelika, and Lori A. Zonner (1996). ‘Clowning: An Opportunity for Ministry.’ Journal of Religion and Health 35 (2): 141–48.
Miller Van Blerkom, Linda (1995). ‘Clown Doctors: Shaman Healers of Western Medicine.’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9 (4): 462–75.
An Improbable Innovation
‘Odor Generation Alarm and Method for Informing Unusual Situation’
a/k/a a wasabi-fume-emitting alarm by Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi, and Junichi Murakami (US Patent application no. 2010/0308995 A1, filed 2009 and honoured with the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry)
The Cheese Files
Because race is an uncomfortable topic for many people, certain questions simply do not get discussed. It is now nearly thirty years since the publication of Beth A. Scanlon’s blockbuster report ‘Race Differences in Selection of Cheese Color’. In all that time, the report has received nary a mention in public forums.
I have found no reference to Scanlon’s report in any political speech, anywhere. This is not surprising. No skilled politician likes to venture near a potentially divisive subject on which public sentiment is still unclear.
Scholars, on the other hand, sometimes love to stake out an early position on a controversial issue. It’s a simple way to make a name for oneself in the professional community. But the academic world, too, has been virtually silent on the question of race differences in selection of cheese colour.
Only one other published academic paper pays any attention to the Scanlon race/cheese-colour report. And the paper, published in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, does it glancingly, in a curious sentence that begins: ‘In some cases, subjects are encumbered with: red eye-goggles (DuBose et al. 1980), blindfolds (Hyman 1983; Scanlon 1985), red lights (Hall 1958; DuBose et al. 1980) or red glass (Duncker 1939) to mask color; funnels and jugs for spitting (Looy, Callaghan & Weingarten 1992)’.
The emphasis in that little mention, obviously, is on blindfolds. But blindfolds are a mere detail of Beth Scanlon’s experiment. Her quest – to explore race differences in selection of cheese colour – gets overlooked.
The Scanlon report itself is brief – just one page long. And it is blunt. ‘White and yellow American cheese was presented to 155 individuals from three ethnic groups’, Scanlon writes. One group is black, one white, the other Hispanic. ‘In a supermarket, a display table was set with two plates of American cheese, one yellow, one white. As the individuals selected a piece of cheese, the grouping and the color of the chosen cheese was recorded.’
Scanlon also offered the cheese to an extra, so-called ‘control’ group of people, each of whom was blindfolded. The blindfolded cheese-samplers, she says, ‘reported no significant difference in flavor of the cheeses’.
The overall results of the experiment? Scanlon concludes that ‘the preferences for one of two colors of American cheese are dissimilar for different races of respondents’.
As far as I could determine, this is the only research report Beth A. Scanlon ever published. She was – though is no longer – based at Central Connecticut State University. What was her int
ent in exploring race differences in selection of cheese colour? Why did no one pick up on and continue her line of research? Why did Scanlon herself drop the question, and what has she done with her time instead? These remain mysteries.
Scanlon, Beth A. (1985). ‘Race Differences in Selection of Cheese Color.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 61 (1): 314.
Garber, Lawrence L., Jr, Eva M. Hyatt, and Richard G. Starr, Jr (2000). ‘Placing Food Color Experimentation into a Valid Consumer Context.’ Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 8: 59–72.
In Brief
‘Scratch and Sniff: The Dynamic Duo’
by W. Z. Stitt and A. Goldsmith (published in the Archives of Dermatology, 1995)
Laundry Marks
In a laundromat, how do people behave? Scholars mostly avoided the question until the early 1980s, when Regina Kenen, an assistant professor of sociology at Trenton State College in New Jersey, became the first sociologist to camp out in a middle-class laundry and take detailed notes.
Scholars as a group have a mixed reputation about personal cleanliness in general, and clothes-washing in particular. Kenen subtly addresses this early in her report, which is entitled ‘Soapsuds, Space, and Sociability: A Participant Observation of the Laundromat’. She gathered her data, she tells us, in ‘the San Francisco Bay area laundromat that I used regularly’.
Kenen sketches her fellow clothes-washers for us. ‘The apparel they wear is very informal. Occasionally, some women come in heavily made up, wearing stiletto heels, stockings, and dressy clothes. They stick out as oddities; even more rarely, men wear suits.’
Then it’s down to business: keen descriptions of these people’s actions and interactions. For the lay reader, there are insights aplenty.
Customers ‘glance around to see where there are empty washing machines but do not ordinarily look at individuals directly ... If the laundromat is fairly empty and they have the choice, they often leave an empty machine between theirs and adjacent users’.
The launderers don’t interact much. There are, however, some key exceptions. Those who come to the laundromat together or meet a friend there ‘converse, laugh, and touch while engaged in the tasks and there is a sense of mutuality and involvement with each other that clearly signals that they are a unit and not interested in further interaction with others.’ Lone individuals ‘maintain more solemn facial expressions than do couples, and they do not talk to strangers except in a purely functional way, e.g., to say “excuse me” when they are trying to move their cart full of wet clothes to the dryer or to say to someone, “you dropped something”.’
Some customers leave, and return after their clothes are done. Others stay the whole time. The hangers-on engage in a variety of behaviours.
Some sit and read. Kenen categorizes them into four distinct types. The ‘desultory’ reader ‘merely flips pages of a magazine or newspaper’. The ‘interested’ reader reads newspapers or magazines ‘with seeming intent and concentration’. The ‘involved’ reader brings his or her own books ‘and is completely oblivious of the surroundings’. The ‘instrumental’ reader reads ‘textbooks and other assigned materials’.
Kenen also saw people eating. She concluded that ‘much snacking occurs in the laundromat and seems to serve some of the same purposes as it does in the rest of the society’.
Kenen later went to a laundry in a poor, Latino neighbourhood. There, customers socialized more than did the customers in the other laundromat. This influenced the study’s ultimate conclusion: ‘Laundromat behaviors appear to be more influenced by the larger sociocultural context in which they are enmeshed.’
This remains, all these years later, sociology’s most comprehensive statement of how people behave in a laundromat.
Kenen, Regina (1982). ‘Soapsuds, Space, and Sociability: A Participant Observation of the Laundromat.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 11 (2): 163–83.
The Nudist Research Library
The American Nudist Research Library has a fairly simple motto: ‘Dedicated to preserving nudist history with a comprehensive archive of nudist material’. Like all specialist libraries, it operates with a limited budget. Thus, the library covers only what it needs to.
The institution marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2004. The celebratory material explained that ‘the Library was established in 1979 to preserve the history of the social nudist movement in North America and throughout the world. It is a repository of material rather than a circulating library. Visitors may read or view most of the collection as long as they are in the Library.’
The facility is in Kissimmee, Florida, on the grounds of Cypress Cove Nudist Resort, just a few miles from Disney World. Visitors are welcomed, whether or not they come equipped with clothing.
A library is a good place to conduct research. This particular library may be a good place to settle an ever-so-slight controversy in the field of cognitive science. Cognitive scientists, some of them, want to know how looking at nude bodies can affect a person’s memory.
Dr Stephen R. Schmidt, a professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University, tried to settle the question by showing nude photographs to a group of volunteers. He conducted a series of experiments, which he subsequently described in a report called ‘Outstanding Memories: The Positive and Negative Effects of Nudes on Memory’.
Schmidt exposed his volunteers to carefully selected photographs, which he presented in various orders and paced at different time intervals. Here is a partial list of the photos: woman pumping gas; man climbing a mountain; woman sitting at a window reading a newspaper; man stacking wood; woman playing a cello. Some – but not all – of the men were nude. Ditto for the women.
This was a sophisticated follow-up to much earlier experiments that were done by psychologists Douglas Detterman and Norman Ellis. Detterman and Ellis embedded a photo of male and female nudes, which they obtained from an issue of Sunbathing magazine, into a series of black-and-white line drawings of common objects, and then showed the lot of them to volunteers. The result: ‘Not surprisingly, memory for the nudes was much better than memory for [other items] – approaching 100% correct. However, the presence of the nudes caused amnesia, in that memory for items immediately preceding and following the nudes was poor.’
The point of this research? To tease out the subtle nature of why some memories are retained and others forgotten. Why nudes? Because, says Schmidt, ‘nudes (rather than other emotional stimuli) seem to provide reliably strong effects’.
Live nudes would seem to provide more reliably strong effects than one would get from photographs of nudes. The American Nudist Research Library has nudes of both varieties, a bounty that should be of interest to scientists.
And it may be instructive to librarians elsewhere who lament that people don’t visit libraries the way they used to.
Schmidt, Stephen R. (2002). ‘Outstanding Memories: The Positive and Negative Effects of Nudes on Memory.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 28 (2): 353–61.
Choosing Where to Go
Where do people go? Though it’s a simple question, scholars disagree about where people choose to go to the toilet. What specifically concerns these scholars is a small aspect of the larger puzzle. When you give someone a choice of several, say four, toilet stalls arranged all in a row, which stall do people choose to use?
In the past forty years, there have been two major experimental studies on this topic. The results of the one directly contradict those of the other. The first, in Antarctica, discovered that people prefer the stalls at the ends. The other, in California, found that people prefer the middle stalls.
Figure: ‘Comparison of amount of faeces accumulated under the lavatory seats in a lavatory at the Antarctic’
The two experiments were done under greatly differing conditions, so there is plenty of room for argument about what it all means.
Dr H. Hachisuga, a physiologist, spent a winter at Japan’s Syowa research station
in Antarctica. For reasons that are now obscure, he recorded the amount of faeces that accumulated and froze under each of the base’s four adjoining outdoor toilet stalls. Hachigusa used those measurements to estimate the ‘frequency of utilization’ of each seat. As Hachisuga watched the data mount up, he saw evidence that the end stalls enjoyed considerably higher usage than the middle stalls. He attributed this to what he called the psychological influence of corner preference.
Hachisuga presented a summary of his work in 1972, at a symposium on Antarctic medical studies, held under the auspices of the Japanese Society of Biometeorology. The presentation was later published in the medical journal Igaku No Ayumi. It includes a cutaway-view drawing of the four stalls. The two centre stalls are vacant. In each of the end stalls, a seated man labours stoically at his task. Below each of the stalls, a chamber contains a pile of data, the pile size indicative of the stall’s popularity.
Professor Nicholas Christenfeld of the University of California, San Diego, monitored four stalls in a public restroom at a California beach. He had the custodian count how many toilet-paper rolls were replaced in each stall over a ten-week period. The results: if toilet-paper consumption translates accurately into stall usage, the middle stalls were used half-again as often as the outer stalls. Christenfeld’s terse explanation: people ‘reliably prefer the middle ones and avoid the extremes’.
Christenfeld did his California toilet monitorings more than two decades after Hachisuga conducted the Antarctic output experiment. Yet Christenfeld, in his published study, makes no mention of the earlier research – quite possibly he was unaware of Hachisuga’s body of work.
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