The researchers say they were inspired, at least a little, by a study done nearly a century ago. In 1916, a researcher based at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, wanted to understand what she called ‘the nature of the psychological response to proper names of unknown persons’. Basically, she asked: What sort of person is named Rupzóiyat?
In particular, the researcher, who herself was named G. English, wanted to test a theory proposed by a Swiss psychologist named Édouard Claparède. The theory says that, ‘other things equal, names consisting of heavy or repeated syllables call forth images of fat, heavy-set, bloated, or slightly ridiculous individuals; a short and sonorous name, on the other hand, suggests slender and active persons, etc.’.
English concocted fifty ‘nonsense names’ – names stuck together with syllables she chose at random. Then she tested the names on eight people. Here’s how she described the experiment: ‘Each name was pronounced three times over, the experimenter being careful to pronounce it slowly, distinctly, and (as nearly as possible) always in the same manner. [Then the observer was asked] to describe the person that “must belong to the name”.’
English’s fifty names: Chérin, Póisher, Kilom, Koikert, Vázal, Dáwfisp, Zóque, Spren, Dáwthô, Rupzóiyat, Blag, Lísrix, Thaspkûwhin, Kîrd’faumish, Génras, Tháchô, Brob, Zóitû, Kóldak, Múrbix, Chermtgáwkonv, Bóppum, Vúshap, Grib, Watshóiquol, Móiki, Hoxzáuwhuk, Gáwthû, Zé’the, Gówsü, Déznep, Wítaw, Thôbonf, Mávquawpûnt, Stisk, Tówbant, Táquû, Skamth, Quajnûmeth, Bünoy, Drup, Gúklal, Pófmoj, Spux, Jíkzel, Snemth, Thúbtawkarnth, Línrêwex, Gronch, and Túpjoz.
English also asked the observers to try to spell the names back to her. She didn’t care whether they got the spelling right. She just wanted to ensure that they had heard her clearly.
The results disappointed her: ‘In only five cases was there anything like agreement among all observers as to sex or other characteristics. Rupzóiyat was reported as a young man by all observers; Bóppum was said to be a tall, fat or large man by six observers.’ Of the eight observers, ‘five thought Zé’the must be a girl; six reported Grib as a small man; and five reported Kîrd’faumish as a strong or big man. For all the remainder there was disagreement.’
English decided that ‘there is no constant or uniform tendency among these observers [to] imagine a similar type of individual for the same name.’
She mused about the way Charles Dickens played with nonsense names. But she concluded that maybe Dickens – and maybe all of us – only occasionally see a person’s name as some sort of guide to their nature: ‘We know that Dickens came to [evolve the name] Chuzzlewit through Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig. The name was significant to him; and yet there were various types of Chuzzlewit, as there were various types of Nickleby. Indeed, the applicability of a surname to all the members of a family must, one would suppose, tend to prevent our attaching any special import to the name’s physiognomy.’
Lea, Melissa A., Robin D. Thomas, Nathan A. Lamkin, and Aaron Bell (2007). ‘Who Do You Look Like? Evidence for the Existence of Facial Stereotypes for Male Names.’ Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14 (5): 901–7.
English, G. (1916). ‘On the Psychological Response to Unknown Proper Names.’ American Journal of Psychology 27: 430–34.
Call for Investigators
The Rhyming Monikers Research Citation Bibliography Project, announced here, is searching for additions to its collection of outstanding research on which the co-authors names rhyme.
Definition : For the purposes of the project, a Rhyming Moniker involves sound correspondence in at least the terminal syllable of the co-authors’ surnames. The first specimen in the collection, unearthed by Investigator Russell Mortishire-Smith, serves as a model organism:
‘Measurement of Long-Range 13C-13C J Couplings in a 20-kDa Protein-Peptide Complex’ by Ad Bax, David Max, and David Zax (published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society , 1992). The authors are at what is abbreviatingly referred to as the Lab. Chem. Phys., Natl. Inst. Diabetes Dig. Kidney Dis., Bethesda, Maryland.
Bax, Max, Zax. The names ring out. They sing out. An impressive contribution.
Purpose : The collection will be made available to other researchers for cross-variable and meta-analysis.
If you have identified a new specimen, please send to [email protected] with the subject line:
RHYMING MONIKERS RESEARCH CITATION COLLECTION
Trolling for Annoyance
Trolls – call them Internet trolls, if you like – are distant behavioural kin to Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoan parasite that causes malaria in large numbers of human beings. Both kinds of parasite are maddeningly difficult to suppress. They manage, again and again, to return after we thought we’d seen the last of them. Each can, if left untreated, cause agony or worse.
These trolls infect any place where people gather electronically to converse by writing comments to each other. Trolls creep into and crop up anywhere they can, wheedling for attention in chat rooms, listservs, twitter streams, blogs, and as you may have noticed, in the comments section of online news articles.
One of the many annoying things about Internet trolls is that it’s difficult to define precisely, with academic rigour, what they do. Claire Hardaker, a lecturer at University of Central Lancashire’s department of linguistics and English language, took up the challenge. Her study called ‘Trolling in Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication’ is published somewhat counter-intuitively in the Journal of Politeness Research.
Hardaker presented an early form of the paper to a mostly troll-free audience at the Linguistic Impoliteness and Rudeness conference held at her university in 2009.
After much research and hard work, Hardaker came up with a working definition. A troll is someone ‘who constructs the identity of sincerely wishing to be part of the group in question, including professing, or conveying pseudo-sincere intentions, but whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement’.
Detail: Trolling for an annoying example
She arrived at this after much trolling (in a very different sense of that word) through data. Lots of data. A ‘172-million-word corpus of unmoderated, asynchronous computer-mediated communication’, a nine-year collection of commentary in an online discussion group about horseback riding. She focused in on the huge number of passages where people mentioned trolls, trolling, trolled, trollish, trolldom, and other variations on the key word ‘troll’.
Distilling the wisdom of the horse-talk crowd, Hardaker set up this handy guide to interacting with trolls: ‘Trolling can (1) be frustrated if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but are not provoked into responding, (2) be thwarted, if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but counter in such a way as to curtail or neutralize the success of the troller, (3) fail, if users do not correctly interpret an intent to troll and are not provoked by the troller, or, (4) succeed, if users are deceived into believing the troller’s pseudo-intention(s), and are provoked into responding sincerely. Finally, users can mock troll. That is, they may undertake what appears to be trolling with the aim of enhancing or increasing affect, or group cohesion.’
Any comments?
Hardaker, Claire (2010). ‘Trolling in Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication: From User Discussions To Academic Definitions.’ Journal of Politeness Research 6 (2): 215–42.
In Brief
‘Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly’
by Daniel M. Oppenheimer (published in Applied Cognitive Psychology and honoured with the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in literature)
The Psychology of Repetitive Reading
A typical adult knows almost nothing about the psychology of repetitive reading. This is not surprising. Research psychologists, as a group, know little about the subject, though some have a
ttempted to close the gap.
Human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, a scientist named N. Borgovsky asked two hundred subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.
Borgovsky began his experiment by recruiting several dozen people, whom he asked to be his research subjects. A typical adult knows almost nothing about the psychology of repetitive reading. (This is not surprising. Research psychologists, as a group, know little about the subject, though some have attempted to close the gap.) So Borgovsky sat his subjects down in a room, and explained that human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, he told them, a scientist asked two hundred subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.
After giving his subjects that background information, Borgovsky described his own experiment in great detail. The experiment was based on a book he had read. The book was based on the idea that human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, a scientist asked two hundred subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.
After Borgovsky carried out his experiment, he published a report. Called ‘The Psychology of Repetitive Reading’, it explains that human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, a scientist – Borgovsky, in fact – asked two hundred subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.
Meaning? Meaning? Meaning?
Yes, yes, yes – there are many ways to repeat yourself. Some are more meaningful than others, says a clever linguist in the Netherlands.
Technically speaking, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ is an example of ‘multiple sayings in social interaction’. Tanya Stivers has pursued, bagged, and intensively studied a small herd of multiple sayings. Her thirty-three-page report about them, called ‘“No no no” and Other Types of Multiple Sayings in Social Interaction’, was published in the journal Human Communication Research.
Stivers is based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She decided to look at just one species in the multiple-sayings menagerie. The repetition ‘Okay okay okay’ interests Stivers a lot. The repetition ‘Okay. Okay. Okay’ does not.
‘Okay okay okay’ is ‘a single stretch of talk’.
‘Okay. Okay. Okay’, on the other hand, is ‘multiple packages’.
She believes that the one is, in a way, quite different from the other. Repeating little phrases as a single lump can imply something deep and simple: that the other person’s whole course of action is problematic and should be halted.
Stivers illustrates her point with lots of snatches of conversation. Her report delves into the technical aspects of certain uses of ‘Yes yes yes’, ‘No no no’, ‘Right right right’, ‘I’ll eat ’em / I’ll eat ’em / I’ll eat ’em’, ‘a’right / a’right / a’right’, and ‘I see / I see / I see’.
Most of her examples come from English-language conversations, but Stivers says that ‘the practice has been found in Catalan, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Lao, and Russian, as well’.
Tanya Stivers is part of a small gaggle of scholars who call themselves conversation analytic researchers. Conversation analytic researchers study the anatomy and physiology of people’s jabberings. They record people talking, then have someone transcribe the recordings. Then they analyse / analyse / analyse.
Conversation is complicated stuff, despite the ease with which people yak / yak / yak together. It can be difficult for outsiders – people who are not conversation analytic researchers – to appreciate that these professionals need some unusual skills.
A taste of professionally boiled, sliced conversational analysis can seem off-putting to the casual conversationalist. Here is a not-unusual sample, written by Thomas Holtgraves, of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana: ‘Conversation analytic researchers have demonstrated that conversationalists do appear to be sensitive to the occurrence of dispreferred markers’.
Such technical lingo can make it difficult for people who are not conversation analytic researchers to see what people who are conversation analytic researchers are talking about. This is sad, because what conversation analytic researchers talk about, mostly, is the conversations of people who are not conversation analytic researchers. And the researchers rejoice, because their research tells them that repetition is not – repeat, not – boring.
Stivers, Tanya (2004). ‘“No no no” and Other Types of Multiple Sayings in Social Interaction.’ Human Communication Research 30 (2): 260–93.
Holtgraves, Thomas (2000). ‘Preference Organization and Reply Comprehension.’ Discourse Processes 30 (2): 87–106.
Call for Submissions
If you know of any improbable research – the sort that makes you laugh and think, and that you think will make other people laugh, too – I would be delighted and grateful to hear about it.
Please email me at [email protected] with an improbable subject line of your choosing.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the good editors (and in my experience, they are exactly that) who got and kept me writing for the Guardian and whose suggestions and advice and criticism have almost always been ‘spot on’ (as British people say in books) and encouraging. In order of appearance, they are Tim Radford, Will Woodward, Claire Phipps, Donald MacLeod, and Alice Wooley.
Thank you to my wife, Robin. Thanks to my parents for endowing me with tolerance and curiosity for random assortments. Thanks to my many colleagues and friends and readers (those categories blend) who together comprise Improbable Research – both the uppercase version and the larger, lowercase version – and the Ig Nobel gang. Look on the web site, www.improbable.com, and you’ll see many of their names and much of their influence.
Thanks to the three people most responsible for conjuring whatever it was they conjured that caused this book to apparate: Regula Noetzli and Caspian Dennis, ace agents; and Robin Dennis, ace editor. These Dennises, I believe, are not related to each other, except in the world of books.
Particular thanks to each of the many people who told me about things that wound up in this book. They have been kind in sharing their discoveries with me, that I might share them with you. Here are some of them: Claudio Angelo, Catherine L. Bartlett, Michael L. Begeman, John Bell, Charles Bergquist, Lisa Birk, John D. Bullough, Peter Carboni, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Francesca Collins, Lauradel Collins, Jim Cowdery, Fuzz Crompton, Missy Cummings, Wim Crusio, Kristine Danowski, David Derbyshire, Betsy Devine, Paola Devoto, Tatiana Divens, Matthias Ehrgott, Stanley Eigen, Steve Farrar, Rose Fox, Stefanie Friedhoff, Andrea Gaddini, Martin Gardiner, Rebecca German, David Gevirtz, Tom Gill, Max Glaskin, Diego Golombek, N. Hammond, Ron Hassner, Mark Henderson, Simon Hudson, Alok Jha, Torbjörn Karfunkel, Mark Keiser, David Kessler, Erwin Kompanje, Scott Langill, Tom Lehrer, T. Leighton, Jill LePore, Alan Litsky, Julia Lunetta, Donald MacLeod, James Mahoney, William J. Maloney, G. N. Martin, Neil Martin, Les Martinsson, Maryn McKenna, Chris McManus, Fernando Merino, Rosie Mestel, Katherine Meusey, Kees Moeliker, Jean Monahan, Harold Morowitz, Gabriel Nève, Scott A. Norman, Charles Oppenheim, Eduardo B. Ottoni, Rich Palmer, Ruth Parrish, Michael Ploskonka, Bella Plouffe, Stavros Poulos, Ha
nne Poulsen, Gus Rancatore, James Randerson, Thomas A. Reisner, R. Roberts, Geneva Robertson, Ian Sample, Reto Schneider, M. Schreiber, Sally Shelton, Adrian Smith, Annette Smith, Andrew N. Stephens, Geri Sullivan, Frank Sutman, B. E. Swetman, Vaughn Tan, Tony Taylor, Mary Thomson, Richard Wassersug, Corky White, Amity Wilczek, Michael Wolfson, and Jan Wooten.
Extra Citations
In Brief
Al Fallouji, M. (1990). ‘Traumatic Love Bites.’ British Journal of Surgery 77: 100–1.
Buchanan, D. R., D. Lamb, and A. Seaton (1981). ‘Punk Rocker’s Lung: Pulmonary Fibrosis in a Drug Snorting Fire-Eater.’ British Medical Journal 283: 1661.
Cassaro, A., and M. Daliana (1992). ‘Impaction of an Ingested Table Fork in a Patient with a Surgically Restricted Stomach.’ New York State Journal of Medicine 92 (3): 115.
Cheng, G., Z. Xuand, and J. Xu (2005). ‘Vision of Integrated Happiness Accounting System in China.’ Acta Geographica Sinica 60 (6): 893–901.
Coolidge, Frederick L. (1999). ‘My Grandmother’s Personality: A Posthumous Evaluation.’ Journal of Clinical Geropsychology 5 (3): 215–19.
Earles, C. M., A. Morales, and W. L. Marshall (1988). ‘Penile Sufficiency: An Operational Definition.’ Journal of Urology 139 (3): 536–38.
Foley, J., and J. J. Sheuring (1966). ‘Cause of Microbial Death during Freezing in a Soft-Serve Ice Cream Freezer.’ Journal of Dairy Science 49 (8) 928–32.
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