psychology

the-science-of-how-(and-when)-we-decide-to-speak-out—or-self-censor

The science of how (and when) we decide to speak out—or self-censor

censorship, Human behavior, mathematical modeling, psychology, Science, Social Media / /

The US has adopted more of a middle ground approach, essentially letting private companies decide what they wanted to do. Daymude and his co-authors wanted to investigate these markedly different approaches. So they developed a computational agent-based simulation that modeled how individuals navigate between wanting to express dissent versus fear of punishment. The model also incorporates how an authority adjusts its surveillance and its policies to minimize dissent at the lowest possible cost of enforcement.

“It’s not some kind of learning theory thing,” said Daymude. “And it’s not rooted in empirical statistics. We didn’t go out and ask 1000 people, ‘What would you do if faced with this situation? Would you dissent or self-censor?’ and then build that data into the model. Our model allows us to embed some assumptions about how we think people behave broadly, but then lets us explore parameters. What happens if you’re more or less bold? What happens if punishments are more or less severe? An authority is more or less tolerant? And we can make predictions based on our fundamental assumptions about what’s going to happen.”

Let one hundred flowers bloom

According to their model, the most extreme case is an authoritarian government that adopts a draconian punishment strategy, which effectively represses all dissent in the general population. “Everyone’s best strategic choice is just to say nothing at this point,” said Daymude. “So why doesn’t every authoritarian government on the planet just do this?” That led them to look more closely at the dynamics. “Maybe authoritarians start out somewhat moderate,” he said. “Maybe the only way they’re allowed to get to that extreme endpoint is through small changes over time.”

Daymude points to China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign in the 1950s as an illustrative case. Here, Chairman Mao Zedong initially encouraged open critiques of his government before abruptly cracking down aggressively when dissent got out of hand. The model showed that in such a case, dissenters’ self-censorship gradually increased, culminating in near-total compliance over time.

But there’s a catch. “The opposite of the Hundred Flowers is if the population is sufficiently bold, this strategy doesn’t work,” said Daymude. “The authoritarian can’t find the pathway to become fully draconian. People just stubbornly keep dissenting. So every time it tries to ramp up severity, it’s on the hook for it every time because people are still out there, they’re still dissenting. They’re saying, ‘Catch us if you dare.’”

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Being Santa Claus is a year-round calling

psychology, santa claus, Science / /

Not just a seasonal gig

Frankly, what’s most interesting about the paper isn’t those three fundamental categories, but the personalized glimpses it gives of the people who choose to become professional Santas. While a few Santas might make six figures, most do not, and may even lose money being Santa—they do it anyway for the sheer love of it. Professional Santas usually don’t see the role as seasonal; many build their identities around it, whether they fit the stereotypical Kris Kringle image or not. “My feeling is, if you’re Santa all the time, you have to live as Santa and give up whoever you are,” said one subject. “I’m just striving to be a better person.”

They’ll wear red and green all year round, for instance, or maintain a full white beard.  One Santa trained himself to make “Ho, ho, ho!” his natural laugh. Another redecorated his house as “Santa’s house,” complete with Christmas trees and Santa figurines.

Sometimes it’s viewed as a role: a gay professional Santa, for instance, deliberately suppresses his sexual orientation when playing Santa, complete with partnering with a Mrs. Claus for public appearances. However, a female Santa who goes by Lynx (professional Santas typically take on pseudonyms) who is also a church leader, likens the job to a divine calling: “I can connect with people and remind them they’re loved,” she said. (She also binds her breasts when in costume because “Santa doesn’t have them double-Ds.”)

Perhaps that sense of a higher calling is why even non-prototypical Santas like Lynx persevere in the fact of occasional rejection. One Black Santa recalled being denied the position at a big box store once the interviewer found out his ethnicity, telling him the store didn’t hire Black or Hispanic Santas. “That hurt my heart so much,” he said. A disabled Santa who uses a scooter during parades recalled being criticized by other professional Santas for doing so—but stuck with it.

And while Bad Santa (2003) might be a fun holiday watch, actual “bad Santas” caught smoking, drinking, swearing, or otherwise behaving inappropriately are not popular figures within their community. “You’re never off,” one subject opined. “You lose a little bit of your identity because you can’t let your hair down and be yourself. You don’t know who’s watching you.”

“You’re Santa Claus 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year,” another Santa said. “If you act out, you risk shattering the magic.”

DOI: Academy of Management Journal, 2025. 10.5465/amj.2023.1161  (About DOIs).

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Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.

hypoalgesic effects, pain relief, profanity, psychology, Science / /

The result: Only the F-word had any effect on pain outcomes. The team also measured the subjects’ pain threshold, asking them to indicate when the ice water began to feel painful. Those who chanted the F-word waited longer before indicating they felt pain—in other words, the swearing increased their threshold for pain. Chanting “fouch” or “twizpipe” had no effect on either measure.

F@%*-ing go for it

For this latest study, Stephens was interested in investigating potential mechanisms for swearing as a possible form of disinhibition (usually viewed negatively), building on his team’s 2018 and 2022 papers showing that swearing can improve strength in a chair push-up task. “In many situations, people hold themselves back—consciously or unconsciously—from using their full strength,” said Stephens. “By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow ourselves to push harder in different situations. Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and ‘go for it’ a little more.”

In two separate experiments, participants were asked to select a swear word they’d normally use after, say, bumping their head, and a more neutral word to describe an inanimate object like a table. They then performed the aforementioned chair push-up task: sitting on a sturdy chair and placing their hands under their thighs with the fingers pointed inwards. Then they lifted their feet off the floor and straightened their arms to support their body weight for as long as possible, chanting either the swear word or the neutral word every two seconds. Afterward, subjects competed a questionnaire to assess various aspects of their mental state during the task.

The results: Subjects who swore during the task could support their body weight much longer than those who merely repeated the neutral word. This confirms the reported results of similar studies in the past. Furthermore, subjects reported increases in their sense of psychological “flow,” distraction, and self-confidence, all indicators of increased disinhibition.

“These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace,” said Stephens. “Swearing is literally a calorie-neutral, drug-free, low-cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance.” The team next plans to explore the influence of swearing on public speaking and romantic behaviors, since these are situations where most people are more hesitant and less confident in themselves, and hence more likely to hold back.

DOI: American Psychologist, 2025. 10.1037/amp0001650  (About DOIs).

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Research roundup: 6 cool stories we almost missed

animals, Biology, chemistry, fermentation, microbiology, Physics, psychology, robotics, Science, social networks / /

The assassination of a Hungarian duke, why woodpeckers grunt when they peck, and more.

Skull of remains found in a 13th century Dominican monastery on Margaret Island, Budapest, Hungary Credit: Eötvös Loránd University

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. November’s list includes forensic details of the medieval assassination of a Hungarian duke, why woodpeckers grunt when they peck, and more evidence that X’s much-maligned community notes might actually help combat the spread of misinformation after all.

An assassinated medieval Hungarian duke

The observed perimortem lesions on the human remains (CL=cranial lesion, PL= Postcranial lesion). The drawing of the skeleton was generated using OpenAI’s image generation tools (DALL·E) via ChatGPT.

Credit: Tamás Hajdu et al., 2026

Back in 1915, archaeologists discovered the skeletal remains of a young man in a Dominican monastery on Margaret Island in Budapest, Hungary. The remains were believed to be those of Duke Bela of Masco, grandson of the medieval Hungarian King Bela IV. Per historical records, the young duke was brutally assassinated in 1272 by a rival faction and his mutilated remains were recovered by the duke’s sister and niece and buried in the monastery.

The identification of the remains was based on a contemporary osteological analysis, but they were subsequently lost and only rediscovered in 2018. A paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics has now confirmed that identification and shed more light on precisely how the duke died. (A preprint is available on bioRxiv.]

An interdisciplinary team of researchers performed various kinds of bioarchaeological analysis on the remains. including genetic testing, proteomics, 3D modeling, and radiocarbon dating. The resulting data definitively proves that the skeleton is indeed that of Duke Bela of Masco.

The authors were also able to reconstruct the manner of the duke’s death, concluding that this was a coordinated attack by three people. One attacked from the front while the other two attacked from the left and right sides, and the duke was facing his assassins and tried to defend himself. The weapons used were most likely a saber and a long sword, and the assassins kept raining down blows even after the duke had fallen to the ground. The authors concluded that while the attack was clearly planned, it was also personal and fueled by rage or hate.

DOI: Forensic Science International: Genetics, 2025. 10.1016/j.fsigen.2025.103381  (About DOIs).

Why woodpeckers grunt when they peck

A male Pileated woodpecker foraging on a t

Woodpeckers energetically drum away at tree trunks all day long with their beaks and yet somehow never seem to get concussions, despite the fact that such drumming can produce deceleration forces as high as 1,200 g’s. (Humans suffer concussions with a sudden deceleration of just 100 g’s.) While popular myth holds that woodpecker heads are structured in such a way to absorb the shock, and there has been some science to back that up, more recent research found that their heads act more like hammers than shock absorbers. A paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology sheds further light on the biomechanics of how woodpeckers essentially turn themselves into hammers and reveals that the birds actually grunt as they strike wood.

The authors caught eight wild downy woodpeckers and recorded them drilling and tapping on pieces of hardwood in the lab for three days, while also measuring electrical signals in their heads, necks, abdomens, tails, and leg muscles. Analyzing the footage, they found that woodpeckers use their hip flexors and front neck muscles to propel themselves forward as they peck while tipping their heads back and bracing themselves using muscles at the base of the skull and back of the neck. The birds use abdominal muscles for stability and brace for impact using their tail muscles to anchor their bodies against a tree. As for the grunting, the authors noted that it’s a type of breathing pattern used by tennis players (and martial artists) to boost the power of a strike.

DOI: Journal of Experimental Biology, 2025. 10.1242/jeb.251167  (About DOIs).

Raisins turn water into wine

wine glass half filled with raisins

Credit: Kyoto University

Fermentation has been around in some form for millennia, relying on alcohol-producing yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae; cultured S. cerevisiae is still used by winemakers today. It’s long been thought that winemakers in ancient times stored fresh crushed grapes in jars and relied on natural fermentation to work its magic, but recent studies have called this into question by demonstrating that S. cerevisiae colonies usually don’t form on fresh grape skins. But the yeast does like raisins, as Kyoto University researchers recently discovered. They’ve followed up that earlier work with a paper published in Scientific Reports, demonstrating that it’s possible to use raisins to turn water into wine.

The authors harvested fresh grapes and dried them for 28 days. Some were dried using an incubator, some were sun-dried, and a third batch was dried using a combination of the two methods. The researchers then added the resulting raisins to bottles of water—three samples for each type of drying process—sealed the bottles, and stored them at room temperature for two weeks. One incubator-dried sample and two combo samples successfully fermented, but all three of the sun-dried samples did so, and at higher ethanol concentrations. Future research will focus on identifying the underlying molecular mechanisms. And for those interested in trying this at home, the authors warn that it only works with naturally sun-dried raisins, since store-bought varieties have oil coatings that block fermentation.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2025. 10.1038/s41598-025-23715-3  (About DOIs).

An octopus-inspired pigment

An octopus camouflages itself with the seafloor.

Credit: Charlotte Seid

Octopuses, cuttlefish, and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin’s unique complex structure, including layers of chromatophores, iridophores, and leucophores. A color-shifting natural pigment called xanthommatin also plays a key role, but it’s been difficult to study because it’s hard to harvest enough directly from animals, and lab-based methods of making the pigment are labor-intensive and don’t yield much. Scientists at the University of San Diego have developed a new method for making xanthommatin in substantially larger quantities, according to a paper published in Nature Biotechnology.

The issue is that trying to get microbes to make foreign compounds creates a metabolic burden, and the microbes hence resist the process, hindering yields. The USD team figured out how to trick the cells into producing more xanthommatin by genetically engineering them in such a way that making the pigment was essential to a cell’s survival. They achieved yields of between 1 and 3 grams per liter, compared to just five milligrams of pigment per liter using traditional approaches. While this work is proof of principle, the authors foresee such future applications as photoelectronic devices and thermal coatings, dyes, natural sunscreens, color-changing paints, and environmental sensors. It could also be used to make other kinds of chemicals and help industries shift away from older methods that rely on fossil fuel-based materials.

DOI: Nature Biotechnology, 2025. 10.1038/s41587-025-02867-7  (About DOIs).

A body-swap robot

Participant standing on body-swap balance robot

Credit: Sachi Wickramasinghe/UBC Media Relations

Among the most serious risks facing older adults is falling. According to the authors of a paper published in Science Robotics, standing upright requires the brain to coordinate signals from the eyes, inner ears, and feet to counter gravity, and there’s a natural lag in how fast this information travels back and forth between brain and muscles. Aging and certain diseases like diabetic neuropathy and multiple sclerosis can further delay that vital communication; the authors liken it to steering a car with a wheel that responds half a second late. And it’s a challenge to directly study the brain under such conditions.

That’s why researchers at the University of British Columbia built a large “body swap” robotic platform. Subjects stood on force plates attached to a motor-driven backboard to reproduce the physical forces at play when standing upright: gravity, inertia, and “viscosity,” which in this case describes the damping effect of muscles and joints that allow us to lean without falling. The platform is designed to subtly alter those forces and also add a 200-millisecond delay.

The authors tested 20 participants and found that lowering inertia and making the viscosity negative resulted in similar instability to that which resulted from a signal delay. They then brought in ten new subjects to study whether adjusting body mechanics could compensate for information delays. They found that adding inertia and viscosity could at least partially counter the instability that arose from signal delay—essentially giving the body a small mechanical boost to help the brain maintain balance. The eventual goal is to design wearables that offer gentle resistance when an older person starts to lose their balance, and/or help patients with MS, for example, adjust to slower signal feedback.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2025. 10.1126/scirobotics.adv0496  (About DOIs).

X community notes might actually work

cropped image of phone screen showing an X post with a community note underneath

Credit: Huaxia Rui

Earlier this year, Elon Musk claimed that X’s community notes feature needed tweaking because it was being gamed by “government & legacy media” to contradict Trump—despite vigorously defending the robustness of the feature against such manipulation in the past. A growing body of research seems to back Musk’s earlier stance.

For instance, last year Bloomberg pointed to several studies suggesting that crowdsourcing worked just as well as using professional fact-checkers when assessing the accuracy of news stories. The latest evidence that crowd-sourcing fact checks can be effective at curbing misinformation comes from a paper published in the journal Information Systems Research, which found that X posts with public corrections were 32 percent more likely to be deleted by authors.

Co-author Huaxia Rui of the University of Rochester pointed out that community notes must meet a threshold before they will appear publicly on posts, while those that do not remain hidden from public view. Seeing a prime opportunity in the arrangement, Rui et al. analyzed 264,600 X posts that had received at least one community note and compared those just above and just below that threshold. The posts were collected from two different periods: June through August 2024, right before the US presidential election (when misinformation typically surges), and the post-election period of January and February 2025.

The fact that roughly one-third of authors responded to public community notes by deleting the post suggests that the built-in dynamics of social media (e.g., status, visibility, peer feedback) might actually help improve the spread of misinformation as intended. The authors concluded that crowd-checking “strikes a balance between First Amendment rights and the urgent need to curb misinformation.” Letting AI write the community notes, however, is probably still a bad idea.

DOI: Information Systems Research, 2025. 10.1287/isre.2024.1609  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Believing misinformation is a “win” for some people, even when proven false

authoritarianism, misinformation, psychology, Science, syndication / /

Why people endorse misinformation

Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.

For example, President Donald Trump incorrectly claimed in August 2025 that crime in Washington, DC, was at an all-time high, generating countless fact-checks of his premise and think pieces about his dissociation from reality.

But we believe that to someone with a symbolic mindset, debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting and are therefore weak. The correct information is easily available but is irrelevant to someone who prioritizes a symbolic show of strength. What matters is signaling one isn’t listening and won’t be swayed.

In fact, for symbolic thinkers, nearly any statement should be justifiable. The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord—a contrarian online provocateur—or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”

Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.

Is this really 5-D chess?

It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. Political theorist Murray Edelman, known for his work on political symbolism, noted that politicians often prefer scoring symbolic points over delivering results—it’s easier. Leaders can offer symbolism when they have little tangible to provide.

Randy Stein is associate professor of marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Abraham Rutchick is professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners

agriculture, animal behavior, animal husbandry, chemistry, engineering, food additives, Ig Nobel Prizes, language, pediatrics, Physics, psychology, Science / /

The annual award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” Credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images

Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.

Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel prizes.

Biology

Example of the area of legs and body used to count biting flies on cows.

Credit: Tomoki Kojima et al., 2019

Citation: Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka, and Katsutoshi Kino, for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.

Any dairy farmer can tell you that biting flies are a pestilent scourge for cattle herds, which is why one so often sees cows throwing their heads, stamping their feet, flicking their tails, and twitching their skin—desperately trying to shake off the nasty creatures. There’s an economic cost as well since it causes the cattle to graze and feed less, bed down for shorter times, and start bunching together, which increases heat stress and risks injury to the animals. That results in less milk yield for dairy cows and less beef yields from feedlot cattle.

You know who isn’t much bothered by biting flies? The zebra. Scientists have long debated the function of the zebra’s distinctive black-and-white striped pattern. Is it for camouflage? Confusing potential predators? Or is it to repel those pesky flies? Tomoki Kojima et al. decided to put the latter hypothesis to the test, painting zebra stripes on six pregnant Japanese black cows at the Aichi Agricultural Research Center in Japan. They used water-borne lacquers that washed away after a few days, so the cows could take turns being in three different groups: zebra stripes, just black stripes, or no stripes (as a control).

The results: the zebra stripes significantly decreased both the number of biting flies on the cattle and the animals’ fly-repelling behaviors compared to those with black stripes or no stripes. The one exception was for skin twitching—perhaps because it is the least energy intensive of those behaviors. Why does it work? The authors suggest it might have something to do with modulation brightness or polarized light that confuses the insects’ motion detection system, used to control their approach when landing on a surface. But that’s a topic for further study.

Chemistry

Freshly cooked frozen w:blintzes in a non-stick frying pan coated with Teflon

Credit: Andrevan/CC BY-SA 2.5

Citation: Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway, for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called “polytetrafluoroethylene”] is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.

Diet sodas and other zero-calorie drinks are a mainstay of the modern diet, thanks to the development of artificial sweeteners whose molecules can’t be metabolized by the human body. The authors of this paper are intrigued by the notion of zero-calorie foods, which they believe could be achieved by increasing the satisfying volume and mass of food without increasing the calories. And they have just the additive for that purpose: polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), more commonly known as Teflon.

Yes, the stuff they use on nonstick cookware. They insist that Teflon is inert, heat-resistant, impervious to stomach acid, tasteless, cost-effective, and available in handy powder form for easy mixing into food. They recommend a ratio of three parts food to one part Teflon powder.

The authors understand that to the average layperson, this is going to sound like a phenomenally bad idea—no thank you, I would prefer not to have powdered Teflon added to my food. So they spend many paragraphs citing all the scientific studies on the safety of Teflon—it didn’t hurt rats in feeding trials!—as well as the many applications for which it is already being used. These include Teflon-coated stirring rods used in labs and coatings on medical devices like bladder catheters and gynecological implants, as well as the catheters used for in vitro fertilization. And guys, you’ll be happy to know that Teflon doesn’t seem to affect sperm motility or viability. I suspect this will still be a hard sell in the consumer marketplace.

Physics

Cacio e pepe is an iconic pasta dish that is also frustratingly difficult to make

Credit: Simone Frau

Citation: Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.

“Pasta alla cacio e pepe” is a simple dish: just tonnarelli pasta, pecorino cheese, and pepper. But its simplicity is deceptive. The dish is notoriously challenging to make because it’s so easy for the sauce to form unappetizing clumps with a texture more akin to stringy mozzarella rather than being smooth and creamy. As we reported in April, Italian physicists came to the rescue with a foolproof recipe based on their many scientific experiments, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids. The trick: using corn starch for the cheese and pepper sauce instead of relying on however much starch leaches into the boiling water as the pasta is cooked.

Traditionally, the chef will extract part of the water and starch solution—which is cooled to a suitable temperature to avoid clumping as the cheese proteins “denaturate”—and mix it with the cheese to make the sauce, adding the pepper last, right before serving. But the authors note that temperature is not the only factor that can lead to this dreaded “mozzarella phase.” If one tries to mix cheese and water without any starch, the clumping is more pronounced. There is less clumping with water containing a little starch, like water in which pasta has been cooked. And when one mixes the cheese with pasta water “risottata”—i.e., collected and heated in a pan so enough water evaporates that there is a higher concentration of starch—there is almost no clumping.

The authors found that the correct starch ratio is between 2 to 3 percent of the cheese weight. Below that, you get the clumping phase separation; above that, and the sauce becomes stiff and unappetizing as it cools. Pasta water alone contains too little starch. Using pasta water “risottata” may concentrate the starch, but the chef has less control over the precise amount of starch. So the authors recommend simply dissolving 4 grams of powdered potato or corn starch in 40 grams of water, heating it gently until it thickens and combining that gel with the cheese. They also recommend toasting the black pepper briefly before adding it to the mixture to enhance its flavors and aromas.

Engineering Design

Experimental set-up (a) cardboard enclosure (b) UV-C tube light (c) SMPS

Credit: Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal

Citation: Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, “how foul-smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”

Shoe odor is a universal problem, even in India, according to the authors of this paper, who hail from Shiv Nadar University (SNU) in Uttar Pradesh. All that heat and humidity means people perspire profusely when engaging even in moderate physical activity. Add in a lack of proper ventilation and washing, and shoes become a breeding ground for odor-causing bacteria called Kytococcus sedentarius. Most Indians make use of shoe racks to store their footwear, and the odors can become quite intense in that closed environment.

Yet nobody has really studied the “smelly shoe” problem when it comes to shoe racks. Enter Kumar and Mittal, who conducted a pilot study with the help of 149 first-year SNU students. More than half reported feeling uncomfortable about their own or someone else’s smelly shoes, and 90 percent kept their shoes in a shoe rack. Common methods to combat the odor included washing the shoes and drying them in the sun; using spray deodorant; or sprinkling the shoes with an antibacterial powder. They were unaware of many current odor-combatting products on the market, such as tea tree and coconut oil solutions, thyme oil, or isopropyl alcohol.

Clearly, there is an opportunity to make a killing in the odor-resistant shoe rack market. So naturally Kumar and Mittal decided to design their own version. They opted to use bacteria-killing UV rays (via a UV-C tube light) as their built-in “odor eater,” testing their device on the shoes of several SNU athletes, “which had a very strong noticeable odor.” They concluded that an exposure time of two to three minutes was sufficient to kill the bacteria and get rid of the odor.

Aviation

Wing membranes (patagia) of Townsend's big-eared bat, Corynorhinus townsendii

Credit: Public domain

Citation: Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine, and Berry Pinshow, for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and also their ability to echolocate.

Nature is rife with naturally occurring ethanol, particularly from ripening fruit, and that fruit in turn is consumed by various microorganisms and animal species. There are occasional rare instances of some mammals, birds, and even insects consuming fruit rich in ethanol and becoming intoxicated, making those creatures more vulnerable to potential predators or more accident-prone due to lessened motor coordination. Sánchez et al. decided to look specifically at the effects of ethanol on Egyptian fruit bats, which have been shown to avoid high-ethanol fruit. The authors wondered if this might be because the bats wanted to avoid becoming inebriated.

They conducted their experiments on adult male fruit bats kept in an outdoor cage that served as a long flight corridor. The bats were given liquid food with varying amounts of ethanol and then released in the corridor, with the authors timing how long it took each bat to fly from one end to the other. A second experiment followed the same basic protocol, but this time the authors recorded the bats’ echolocation calls with an ultrasonic microphone. The results: The bats that received liquid food with the highest ethanol content took longer to fly the length of the corridor, evidence of impaired flight ability. The quality of those bats’ echolocation was also adversely affected, putting them at a higher risk of colliding with obstacles mid-flight.

Psychology

Narcissus (1597–99) by Caravaggio; the man in love with his own reflection

Credit: Public domain

Citation: Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists—or anyone else—that they are intelligent.

Not all narcissists are created equal. There are vulnerable narcissists who tend to be socially withdrawn, have low self-esteem, and are prone to negative emotions. And then there are grandiose narcissists, who exhibit social boldness, high self-esteem, and are more likely to overestimate their own intelligence. The prevailing view is that this overconfidence stems from narcissism. The authors wanted to explore whether this effect might also work in reverse, i.e., that believing one has superior intelligence due to positive external feedback can lead to at least a temporary state of narcissism.

Zajenkowski et al. recruited 361 participants from Poland who were asked to rate their level of intelligence compared to other people; complete the Polish version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory; and take an IQ test to compare their perceptions of their own intelligence with an objective measurement. The participants were then randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group received positive feedback—telling them they did indeed have a higher IQ than most people—while the other received negative feedback.

The results confirmed most of the researchers’ hypotheses. In general, participants gave lower estimates of their relative intelligence after completing the IQ test, which provided an objective check of sorts. But the type of feedback they received had a measurable impact. Positive feedback enhanced their feelings of uniqueness (a key aspect of grandiose narcissism). Those who received negative feedback rated their own intelligence as being lower, and that negative feedback had a larger effect than positive feedback. The authors concluded that external feedback helped shape the subjects’ perception of their own intelligence, regardless of the accuracy of that feedback.

Nutrition

Rainbow lizards eating ‘four cheese’ pizza at a seaside touristic resort in Togo.

Credit: Daniele Dendi et al, 2022

Citation: Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli, for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.

Move over, Pizza Rat, here come the Pizza Lizards—rainbow lizards, to be precise. This is a species common to urban and suburban West Africa. The lizards primarily live off insects and arthropods, but their proximity to humans has led to some developing a more omnivorous approach to their foraging. Bread is a particular favorite. Case in point: One fine sunny day at a Togo seaside resort, the authors noticed a rainbow lizard stealing a tourist’s slice of four-cheese pizza and happily chowing down.

Naturally, they wanted to know if this was an isolated incident or whether the local rainbow lizards routinely feasted on pizza slices. And did the lizards have a preferred topping? Inquiring minds need to know. So they monitored the behavior of nine particular lizards, giving them the choice between a plate of four-cheese pizza and a plate of “four seasons” pizza, spaced about 10 meters apart.

It only took 15 minutes for the lizards to find the pizza and eat it, sometimes fighting over the remaining slices. But they only ate the four-cheese pizza. For the authors, this suggests there might be some form of chemical cues that attract them to the cheesy pizzas, or perhaps it’s easier for them to digest. I’d love to see how the lizards react to the widely derided Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza.

Pediatrics

Pumped breast milk in bottles

Citation: Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic.

Mennella and Beauchamp designed their experiment to investigate two questions: whether the consumption of garlic altered the odor of a mother’s breast milk, and if so, whether those changes affected the behavior of nursing infants. (Garlic was chosen because it is known to produce off flavors in dairy cow milk and affect human body odor.) They recruited eight women who were exclusively breastfeeding their infants, taking samples of their breast milk over a period when the participants abstained from eating sulfurous foods (garlic, onion, asparagus), and more samples after the mothers consumed either a garlic capsule or a placebo.

The results: Mothers who ingested the garlic capsules produced milk with a perceptibly more intense odor, as evaluated by several adult panelists brought in to sniff the breast milk samples. The strong odor peaked at two hours after ingestion and decreased fats, which is consistent with prior research on cows that ingested highly odorous feeds. As for the infants, those whose mothers ingested garlic attached to the breast for longer periods and sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic. This could be relevant to ongoing efforts to determine whether sensory experiences during breastfeeding can influence how readily infants accept new foods upon weaning, and perhaps even their later food preferences.

Literature

closeup of a hand with clubbed fingernails

Credit: William B. Bean

Citation: The late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.

If you’re surprised to see a study on fingernail growth rates under the Literature category, it will all make sense once you read the flowery prose stylings of Dr. Bean. He really did keep detailed records of how fast his fingernails grew for 35 years, claiming in his final report that “the nail provides a slowly moving keratin kymograph that measures age on the inexorable abscissa of time.” He sprinkles his observations with ponderous references to medieval astrology, James Boswell, and Moby Dick, with a dash of curmudgeonly asides bemoaning the sterile modern medical teaching methods that permeate “the teeming mass of hope and pain, technical virtuosity, and depersonalization called a ‘health center.'”

So what did our pedantic doctor discover in those 35 years, not just studying his own nails, but meticulously reviewing all the available scientific literature? Well, for starters, the rate of fingernail growth diminishes as one ages; Bean noted that his growth rates remained steady early on, but “slowed down a trifle” over the last five years of his project. Nails grow faster in children than adults. A warm environment can also accelerate growth, as does biting one’s fingernails—perhaps, he suggests, because the biting stimulates blood flow to the area. And he debunks the folklore of hair and nails growing even after death: it’s just the retraction and contraction of the skin post-mortem that makes it seem like the nails are growing.

Peace

Citation: Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.

Alcohol is well-known to have detrimental effects on what’s known in psychological circles as “executive functioning,” impacting things like working memory and inhibitory control. But there’s a widespread belief among bilingual people that a little bit of alcohol actually improves one’s fluency in a foreign language, which also relies on executive functioning. So wouldn’t being intoxicated actually have an adverse effect on foreign language fluency? Renner et al. decided to investigate further.

They recruited 50 native German-speaking undergrad psychology students at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who were also fluent in Dutch. They were randomly divided into two groups. One group received an alcoholic drink (vodka with bitter lemon), and the other received water. Each participant consumed enough to be slightly intoxicated after 15 minutes, and then engaged in a discussion in Dutch with a native Dutch speaker. Afterward, they were asked to rate their self-perception of their skill at Dutch, with the Dutch speakers offering independent observer ratings.

The researchers were surprised to find that intoxication improved the participants’ Dutch fluency, based on the independent observer reports. (Self-evaluations were largely unaffected by intoxication levels.) One can’t simply attribute this to so-called “Dutch courage,” i.e., increased confidence associated with intoxication. Rather, the authors suggest that intoxication lowers language anxiety, thereby increasing one’s foreign language proficiency, although further research would be needed to support that hypothesis.

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners Read More »

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Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe

cognitive bias, conspiracy theories, culture, false consensus, misinformation, psychology, Science / /

Gordon Pennycook: “It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.”

Credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Belief in conspiracy theories is often attributed to some form of motivated reasoning: People want to believe a conspiracy because it reinforces their worldview, for example, or doing so meets some deep psychological need, like wanting to feel unique. However, it might also be driven by overconfidence in their own cognitive abilities, according to a paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The authors were surprised to discover that not only are conspiracy theorists overconfident, they also don’t realize their beliefs are on the fringe, massively overestimating by as much as a factor of four how much other people agree with them.

“I was expecting the overconfidence finding,” co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University, told Ars. “If you’ve talked to someone who believes conspiracies, it’s self-evident. I did not expect them to be so ready to state that people agree with them. I thought that they would overestimate, but I didn’t think that there’d be such a strong sense that they are in the majority. It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.”

In 2015, Pennycook made headlines when he co-authored a paper demonstrating how certain people interpret “pseudo-profound bullshit” as deep observations. Pennycook et al. were interested in identifying individual differences between those who are susceptible to pseudo-profound BS and those who are not and thus looked at conspiracy beliefs, their degree of analytical thinking, religious beliefs, and so forth.

They presented several randomly generated statements, containing “profound” buzzwords, that were grammatically correct but made no sense logically, along with a 2014 tweet by Deepak Chopra that met the same criteria. They found that the less skeptical participants were less logical and analytical in their thinking and hence much more likely to consider these nonsensical statements as being deeply profound. That study was a bit controversial, in part for what was perceived to be its condescending tone, along with questions about its methodology. But it did snag Pennycook et al. a 2016 Ig Nobel Prize.

Last year we reported on another Pennycook study, presenting results from experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory. That study showed that the AI interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs, even two months later. The secret to its success: the chatbot, with its access to vast amounts of information across an enormous range of topics, could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual. “The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies, that they’re the result of various psychological motives and needs,” Pennycook said at the time.

Miscalibrated from reality

Pennycook has been working on this new overconfidence study since 2018, perplexed by observations indicating that people who believe in conspiracies also seem to have a lot of faith in their cognitive abilities—contradicting prior research finding that conspiracists are generally more intuitive. To investigate, he and his co-authors conducted eight separate studies that involved over 4,000 US adults.

The assigned tasks were designed in such a way that participants’ actual performance and how they perceived their performance were unrelated. For example, in one experiment, they were asked to guess the subject of an image that was largely obscured. The subjects were then asked direct questions about their belief (or lack thereof) concerning several key conspiracy claims: the Apollo Moon landings were faked, for example, or that Princess Diana’s death wasn’t an accident. Four of the studies focused on testing how subjects perceived others’ beliefs.

The results showed a marked association between subjects’ tendency to be overconfident and belief in conspiracy theories. And while a majority of participants believed a conspiracy’s claims just 12 percent of the time, believers thought they were in the majority 93 percent of the time. This suggests that overconfidence is a primary driver of belief in conspiracies.

It’s not that believers in conspiracy theories are massively overconfident; there is no data on that, because the studies didn’t set out to quantify the degree of overconfidence, per Pennycook. Rather, “They’re overconfident, and they massively overestimate how much people agree with them,” he said.

Ars spoke with Pennycook to learn more.

Ars Technica: Why did you decide to investigate overconfidence as a contributing factor to believing conspiracies?

Gordon Pennycook: There’s a popular sense that people believe conspiracies because they’re dumb and don’t understand anything, they don’t care about the truth, and they’re motivated by believing things that make them feel good. Then there’s the academic side, where that idea molds into a set of theories about how needs and motivations drive belief in conspiracies. It’s not someone falling down the rabbit hole and getting exposed to misinformation or conspiratorial narratives. They’re strolling down: “I like it over here. This appeals to me and makes me feel good.”

Believing things that no one else agrees with makes you feel unique. Then there’s various things I think that are a little more legitimate: People join communities and there’s this sense of belongingness. How that drives core beliefs is different. Someone may stop believing but hang around in the community because they don’t want to lose their friends. Even with religion, people will go to church when they don’t really believe. So we distinguish beliefs from practice.

What we observed is that they do tend to strongly believe these conspiracies despite the fact that there’s counter evidence or a lot of people disagree. What would lead that to happen? It could be their needs and motivations, but it could also be that there’s something about the way that they think where it just doesn’t occur to them that they could be wrong about it. And that’s where overconfidence comes in.

Ars Technica: What makes this particular trait such a powerful driving force?

Gordon Pennycook: Overconfidence is one of the most important core underlying components, because if you’re overconfident, it stops you from really questioning whether the thing that you’re seeing is right or wrong, and whether you might be wrong about it. You have an almost moral purity of complete confidence that the thing you believe is true. You cannot even imagine what it’s like from somebody else’s perspective. You couldn’t imagine a world in which the things that you think are true could be false. Having overconfidence is that buffer that stops you from learning from other people. You end up not just going down the rabbit hole, you’re doing laps down there.

Overconfidence doesn’t have to be learned, parts of it could be genetic. It also doesn’t have to be maladaptive. It’s maladaptive when it comes to beliefs. But you want people to think that they will be successful when starting new businesses. A lot of them will fail, but you need some people in the population to take risks that they wouldn’t take if they were thinking about it in a more rational way. So it can be optimal at a population level, but maybe not at an individual level.

Ars Technica: Is this overconfidence related to the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect?

Gordon Pennycook: It’s because of Dunning-Kruger that we had to develop a new methodology to measure overconfidence, because the people who are the worst at a task are the worst at knowing that they’re the worst at the task. But that’s because the same things that you use to do the task are the things you use to assess how good you are at the task. So if you were to give someone a math test and they’re bad at math, they’ll appear overconfident. But if you give them a test of assessing humor and they’re good at that, they won’t appear overconfident. That’s about the task, not the person.

So we have tasks where people essentially have to guess, and it’s transparent. There’s no reason to think that you’re good at the task. In fact, people who think they’re better at the task are not better at it, they just think they are. They just have this underlying kind of sense that they can do things, they know things, and that’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to capture. It’s not specific to a domain. There are lots of reasons why you could be overconfident in a particular domain. But this is something that’s an actual trait that you carry into situations. So when you’re scrolling online and come up with these ideas about how the world works that don’t make any sense, it must be everybody else that’s wrong, not you.

Ars Technica: Overestimating how many people agree with them seems to be at odds with conspiracy theorists’ desire to be unique.  

Gordon Pennycook: In general, people who believe conspiracies often have contrary beliefs. We’re working with a population where coherence is not to be expected. They say that they’re in the majority, but it’s never a strong majority. They just don’t think that they’re in a minority when it comes to the belief. Take the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, where adherents believe it was a false flag operation. In one sample, 8 percent of people thought that this was true. That 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.

So they’re way off. They really, really miscalibrated. But they don’t say 90 percent. It’s 60 percent, enough to be special, but not enough to be on the fringe where they actually are. I could have asked them to rank how smart they are relative to others, or how unique they thought their beliefs were, and they would’ve answered high on that. But those are kind of mushy self-concepts. When you ask a specific question that has an objectively correct answer in terms of the percent of people in the sample that agree with you, it’s not close.

Ars Technica: How does one even begin to combat this? Could last year’s AI study point the way?

Gordon Pennycook: The AI debunking effect works better for people who are less overconfident. In those experiments, very detailed, specific debunks had a much bigger effect than people expected. After eight minutes of conversation, a quarter of the people who believed the thing didn’t believe it anymore, but 75 percent still did. That’s a lot. And some of them, not only did they still believe it, they still believed it to the same degree. So no one’s cracked that. Getting any movement at all in the aggregate was a big win.

Here’s the problem. You can’t have a conversation with somebody who doesn’t want to have the conversation. In those studies, we’re paying people, but they still get out what they put into the conversation. If you don’t really respond or engage, then our AI is not going to give you good responses because it doesn’t know what you’re thinking. And if the person is not willing to think. … This is why overconfidence is such an overarching issue. The only alternative is some sort of propagandistic sit-them-downs with their eyes open and try to de-convert them. But you can’t really convert someone who doesn’t want to be converted. So I’m not sure that there is an answer. I think that’s just the way that humans are.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2025. DOI: 10.1177/01461672251338358  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe Read More »

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Fanfic study challenges leading cultural evolution theory

balance theory, cultural evolution, culture, digital humanities, fan fiction, psychology, Science, social sciences / /

Fanfic community craves familiarity much more than novelty—but reports greater enjoyment from novelty.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Marvel

It’s widely accepted conventional wisdom that when it comes to creative works—TV shows, films, music, books—consumers crave an optimal balance between novelty and familiarity. What we choose to consume and share with others, in turn, drives cultural evolution.

But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong? An analysis based on data from a massive online fan fiction (fanfic) archive contradicts this so-called “balance theory,” according to a paper published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The fanfic community seems to overwhelmingly prefer more of the same, consistently choosing familiarity over novelty; however, they reported greater overall enjoyment when they took a chance and read something more novel. In short: “Sameness entices, but novelty enchants.”

Strictly speaking, authors have always copied characters and plots from other works (cf. many of William Shakespeare’s plays), although the advent of copyright law complicated matters. Modern fan fiction as we currently think of it arguably emerged with the 1967 publication of the first Star Trek fanzine (Spockanalia), which included spinoff fiction based on the series. Star Trek also spawned the subgenre of slash fiction, when writers began creating stories featuring Kirk and Spock (Kirk/Spock, or K/S) in a romantic (often sexual) relationship.

The advent of the World Wide Web brought fan fiction to the masses, starting with Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists and eventually the development of massive online archives where creators could upload their work to be read and commented upon by readers. The subculture has since exploded; there’s fanfic based on everything from Sherlock Holmes to The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Harry Potter. You name it, there’s probably fanfic about it.

There are also many subgenres within fanfic beyond slash, some of them rather weird, like a magical pregnancy (Mpreg) story in which Sherlock Holmes and Watson fall so much in love with each other that one of them becomes magically pregnant. (One suspects Sherlock would not handle morning sickness very well.) Sometimes fanfic even breaks into the cultural mainstream: E.L. James’ bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fan fiction set in the world of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.

So fanfic is a genuine cultural phenomenon—hence its fascination for Simon DeDeo, a complexity scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the Santa Fe Institute who studies cultural evolution and the emergence of social hierarchies. (I reported on DeDeo’s work analyzing the archives of London’s Old Bailey in 2014.) While opinion remains split—even among the authors of the original works—as to whether fanfic is a welcome homage to the original works that just might help drive book sales or whether it constitutes a form of copyright infringement, DeDeo enthusiastically embraces the format.

“It’s the dark matter of creativity,” DeDeo told Ars. “I love that it exists. It’s a very non-elitist form. There’s no New York Times bestseller list. It would be hard to name the most famous fan fiction writers. The world building has been done. The characters exist. The plot elements have already been put together. So the bar to entry is lower. Maybe sometime in the 19th century we get a notion of genius and the individual creator, but that’s not really what storytelling has been about for the majority of human history. In that one sense, fan fiction is closer to what we were doing around the campfire.”

spock lying down in sick bay while kirk holds his hand tenderly at his bedside

Star Trek arguably spawned contemporary fan fiction—including stories imagining Kirk and Spock as romantic partners. Credit: Paramount Pictures

That’s a boon for fanfic writers, most of whom have non-creative day jobs; fanfic provides them with a creative outlet. Every year, when DeDeo asks students in his classes whether they read and/or write fanfic, a significant percentage always raise their hands. (He once asked a woman about why she wrote slash. Her response: “Because no one was writing porn that I wanted to read.”) In fact, that’s how this current study came about. Co-author Elise Jing is one of DeDeo’s former students with a background in both science and the humanities—and she’s also a fanfic connoisseur.

Give them more of the same

Jing thought (and DeDeo concurred) that the fanfic subculture provided an excellent laboratory for studying cultural evolution. “It’s tough to get students to read a book. They write fan fiction voluntarily. This is stuff they care about writing and care about reading. Nobody gets prestige or power in the larger society from writing fan fiction,” said DeDeo. “This is not a top-down model where Hollywood is producing something and then the fans are consuming it. The fans are producing and consuming so it’s a truly self-contained culture that’s constantly evolving. It’s a pure product consumption cycle. People read it, they bookmark it, they write comments on it, and all that gives us insight into how it’s being received. If you’re a psychologist, you couldn’t pay to get this kind of data.”

Fanfic is a tightly controlled ecosystem, so it lacks many of the confounding factors that make it so difficult to study mainstream cultural works. Also, the fan fiction community is enormous, so the potential datasets are huge. For this study, the authors relied on data from the online Archive of Our Own (AO3), which boasts nearly 9 million users covering more than 70,000 different fandoms and some 15 million individual works. (Sadly, the site has since shut down access to its data over concerns of that data being used to train AI.)

According to DeDeo, the idea was to examine the question of cultural evolution on a population level, rather than on the individual level: “How do these individual things agglomerate to produce the culture? “

Strong positive correlation is found between the response variables except for the Kudos-to-hits ratio. Topic novelty is weakly positively correlated with Kudos-to-hits ratio, but negatively correlated with the other response variables.

Strong positive correlation is found between the response variables except for the Kudos-to-hits ratio. Topic novelty is weakly positively correlated with Kudos-to-hits ratio but negatively correlated with the other response variables. Credit: E. Jing et al., 2025

The results were striking. AO3 members overwhelmingly preferred familiarity in their fan fiction, i.e., more of the same. One notable exception was a short story that was both hugely popular and highly novel. Simply titled “I Am Groot,” the story featured the character from Guardians of the Galaxy. The text is just “I am Groot” repeated 40,000 times—a stroke of genius in that this is entirely consistent with the canonical MCU character, whose entire dialogue consists of those words, with meaning conveyed by shifts of tone and context. But such exceptions proved to be very rare.

“We were so stunned that balance theory wasn’t working,” said DeDeo, who credits Jing with the realization that they were dealing with two distinct pieces of the puzzle: how much is being consumed, and how much people like what they consume, i.e., enjoyment. Their analysis revealed, first, that people really don’t want an optimized mix of familiar and new; they want the same thing over and over again, even within the fanfic community. But when people do make the effort to try something new, they tend to enjoy it more than just consuming more of the same.

In short, “We are anti-balance theory,” said DeDeo. “In biology, for example, you make a small variation in the species and you get micro-evolution. In culture, a minor variation is just less likely to be consumed. So it really is a mystery how we evolve at all culturally; it’s not happening by gradual movement. We can see that there’s novelty. We can see that when people encounter novelty, they enjoy it. But we can’t quite make sense of how these two competing effects work out.”

“This is the great paradox,” said DeDeo. “Culture has to be stable. Without long-term stability, there’s no coherent body of work that can even constitute of culture if every year fan fiction totally changes. That inherent cultural conservatism is in some sense a precondition for culture to exist at all.” Yet culture does evolve, even within the fanfic community.

One possible alternative is some kind of punctuated equilibrium model for cultural evolution, in which things remain stable but undergo occasional leaps forward. “One story about how culture evolves is that eventually, the stuff that’s more enjoyable than what people keep re-consuming somehow becomes accessible to the majority of the community,” said DeDeo. “Novelty might act as a gravitational pull on the center and [over time] some new material gets incorporated into the culture.” He draws an analogy to established tech companies like IBM versus startups, most of which die out; but those few that succeed often push the culture substantially forward.

Perhaps there are two distinct groups of people: those who actively seek out new things and those who routinely click on familiar subject matter because even though their enjoyment might be less, it’s not worth overcoming their inertia to try out something new. Perhaps it is those who seek novelty that sow the seeds of eventual shifts in trends.

“Is it that we’re tired? Is it that we’re lazy? Is this a conflict within a human or within a culture?” said DeDeo. “We don’t know because we only get the raw numbers. If we could track an individual reader to see how they moved between these two spaces, that would be really interesting.”

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05166-3  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Fanfic study challenges leading cultural evolution theory Read More »

why-incels-take-the-“blackpill”—and-why-we-should-care

Why incels take the “Blackpill”—and why we should care

incel culture, incels, manosphere, psychology, Science, sociology / /

“Don’t work for Soyciety”

A growing number of incels are NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). That should concern us all.

The Netlix series Adolescence explores the roots of misogynistic subcultures. Credit: Netflix

The online incel (“involuntary celibate”) subculture is mostly known for its extreme rhetoric, primarily against women, sometimes erupting into violence. But a growing number of self-identified incels are using their ideology as an excuse for not working or studying. This could constitute a kind of coping mechanism to make sense of their failures—not just in romantic relationships but also in education and employment, according to a paper published in the journal Gender, Work, & Organization.

Contrary to how it’s often portrayed, the “manosphere,” as it is often called, is not a monolith. Those who embrace the “Redpill” ideology, for example, might insist that women control the “sexual marketplace” and are only interested in ultramasculine “Chads.” They champion self-improvement as a means to make themselves more masculine and successful, and hence (they believe) more attractive to women—or at least better able to manipulate women.

By contrast, the “Blackpilled” incel contingent is generally more nihilistic. These individuals reject the Redpill notion of alpha-male masculinity and the accompanying focus on self-improvement. They believe that dating and social success are entirely determined by one’s looks and/or genetics. Since there is nothing they can do to improve their chances with women or their lot in life, why even bother?

“People have a tendency to lump all these different groups together as the manosphere,” co-author AnnaRose Beckett-Herbert of McGill University told Ars. “One critique I have of the recent Netflix show Adolescence—which was well done overall—is they lump incels in with figures like Andrew Tate, as though it’s all interchangeable. There’s areas of overlap, like extreme misogyny, but there are really important distinctions. We have to be careful to make those distinctions because the kind of intervention or prevention efforts that we might direct towards the Redpill community versus the Blackpill community might be very different.”

Incels constitute a fairly small fraction of the manosphere, but the vast majority of incels appear to embrace the Blackpill ideology, per Beckett-Herbert. That nihilistic attitude can extend to any kind of participation in what incels term “Soyciety”—including educational attainment and employment. When that happens, such individuals are best described by the acronym NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training).

“It’s not that we have large swaths of young men that are falling into this rabbit hole,” said Beckett-Herbert. “Their ideology is pretty fringe, but we’re seeing the community grow, and we’re seeing the ideology spread. It used to be contained to romantic relationships and sex. Now we’re seeing this broader disengagement from society as a whole. We should all be concerned about that trend.”

The NEET trend is also tied to the broader cultural discourse on how boys and young men are struggling in contemporary society. While prior studies tended to focus on the misogynistic rhetoric and propensity for violence among incels, “I thought that the unemployment lens was interesting because it’s indicative of larger problems,” said Beckett-Herbert. “It’s important to remember that it’s not zero-sum. We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don’t have to be at odds.”

“Lie down and rot”

Beckett-Herbert and her advisor/co-author, McGill University sociologist Eran Shor, chose the incels.is platform as a data source for their study due to its ease of public access and relatively high traffic, with nearly 20,000 members. The pair used Python code to scrape 100 pages, amounting to around 10,000 discussion threads between October and December 2022. A pilot study revealed 10 keywords that appeared most frequently in those threads: “study,” “school,” “NEET,” “job,” “work,” “money,” “career,” “wage,” “employ,” and “rot.” (“They use the phrase ‘lie down and rot’ a lot,” said Beckett-Herbert.)

This allowed Beckett-Herbert and Shor to narrow their sample down to 516 threads with titles containing those keywords. They randomly selected a subset of 171 discussion threads for further study. That analysis yielded four main themes that dominated the discussion threads: political/ideological arguments about being NEET; boundary policing; perceived discrimination; and bullying and marginalization.

Roughly one-quarter of the total comments consisted of political or ideological arguments promoting being NEET, with most commenters advocating minimizing one’s contributions to society as much as possible. They suggested going on welfare, for instance, to “take back” from society, or declared they should be exempt from paying any taxes, as “compensation for our suffering.” About 25 percent—a vocal minority—pushed back on glorifying the NEET lifestyle and offered concrete suggestions for self-improvement. (“Go outside and try at least,” one user commented.)

Such pushback often led to boundary policing. Those who do pursue jobs or education run the risk of being dubbed “fakecels” and becoming alienated from the rest of the incel community. (“Don’t work for a society that hates you,” one user commented.) “There’s a lot of social psychological research on groupthink and group polarization that is relevant here,” said Beckett-Herbert. “A lot of these young men may not have friends in their real life. This community is often their one source of social connection. So the incel ideology becomes core to their identity: ‘I’m part of this community, and we don’t work. We are subhumans.'”

There were also frequent laments about being discriminated against for not being attractive (“lookism”), both romantically and professionally, as well as deep resentment of women’s increased presence in the workplace, deemed a threat to men’s own success. “They love to cherry-pick all these findings from psychology research [to support their position],” said Beckett-Herbert. For instance, “There is evidence that men who are short or not conventionally attractive are discriminated against in hiring. But there’s also a lot of evidence suggesting that this actually affects women more. Women who are overweight face a greater bias against them in hiring than men do, for example.”

Beckett-Herbert and Shor also found that about 15 percent of the comments in their sample concerned users’ experiences being harassed or bullied (usually by other men), their mental health challenges (anxiety, depression), and feeling estranged or ostracized at school or work—experiences that cemented their reluctance to work or engage in education or vocational training.

Many of these users also mentioned being autistic, in keeping with prior research showing a relatively high share of people with autism in incel communities. The authors were careful to clarify, however, that most people with autism “are not violent or hateful, nor do they identify as incels or hold explicitly misogynistic views,” they wrote. “Rather, autism, when combined with other mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, may make young men more vulnerable to incel ideologies.”

There are always caveats. In this case, the study was limited to a single incel forum, which might not be broadly representative of similar discussions on other platforms. And there could be a bit of selection bias at play. Not every incel member may actively participate in discussion threads (lurkers) and non-NEET incels might be less likely to do so either because they have less free time or don’t wish to be dismissed as “fakecels.”However, Beckett-Herbert and Shor note that their findings are consistent with previous studies that suggest there are a disproportionately large number of NEETs within the incel community.

A pound of prevention

Is effective intervention even possible for members of the incel community, given their online echo chamber? Beckett-Herbert acknowledges that it is very difficult to break through to such people. “De-radicalization is a noble, worthy line of research,” she said. “But the existing evidence from that field of study suggests that prevention is easier and more effective than trying to pull these people out once they’re already in.” Potential strategies might include fostering better digital and media literacy, i.e., teaching kids to be cognizant of the content they’re consuming online. Exposure time is another key issue.

“A lot of these young people don’t have healthy outlets that are not in the digital world,” said Beckett-Herbert “They come home from school and spend hours and hours online. They’re lonely and isolated from real-world communities and structures. Some of these harmful ideologies might be downstream of these larger root causes. How can we help boys do better in school, feel better prepared for the labor market? How can we help them make more friends? How can we get them involved in real-world activities that will diminish their time spent online? I think that that can go a long way. Just condemning them or banning their spaces—that’s not a good long-term solution.”

While there are multiple well-publicized instances of self-identified incels committing violent acts—most notably Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014—Beckett-Herbert emphasizes not losing sight of incels’ fundamental humanity. “We focus a lot on the misogyny, the potential for violence against women, and that is so important,” she said. “You will not hear me saying we should not focus on that. But we also should note that statistically, an incel is much more likely to commit suicide or be violent towards themselves than they are toward someone else. You can both condemn their ideology and find it abhorrent and also remember that we need to have empathy for these people.”

Many people—women especially—might find that a tall order, and Beckett-Herbert understands that reluctance. “I do understand people’s hesitancy to empathize with them, because it feels like you’re giving credence to their rhetoric,” she said. “But at the end of the day, they are human, and a lot of them are really struggling, marginalized people coming from pretty sad backgrounds. When you peruse their online world, it’s the most horrifying, angering misogyny right next to some of the saddest mental health, suicidal, low self-esteem stuff you’ve ever seen. I think humanizing them and having empathy is going to be foundational to any intervention efforts to reintegrate them. But it’s something I wrestle with a lot.”

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Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Why incels take the “Blackpill”—and why we should care Read More »

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New twist on marshmallow test shows power of a promise

cooperative behavior, Human behavior, Marshmallow Test, psychology, Science, sociology / /

There have also been several studies examining the effects of social interdependence and similar social contexts on children’s ability to delay gratification, using variations of the marshmallow test paradigm. For instance, in 2020, a team of German researchers adapted the classic experimental setup using Oreos and vanilla cookies with German and Kenyan schoolchildren, respectively. If both children waited to eat their treat, they received a second cookie as a reward; if one did not wait, neither child received a second cookie. They found that the kids were more likely to delay gratification when they depended on each other, compared to the standard marshmallow test.

An online paradigm

Rebecca Koomen, a psychologist now at the University of Manchester, co-authored the 2020 study as well as this latest one, which sought to build on those findings. Koomen et al. structured their experiments similarly, this time recruiting 66 UK children, ages 5 to 6, as subjects. They focused on how promising a partner not to eat a favorite treat could inspire sufficient trust to delay gratification, compared to the social risk of one or both partners breaking that promise. Any parent could tell you that children of this age are really big on the importance of promises, and science largely concurs; a promise has been shown to enhance interdependent cooperation in this age group.

Koomen and her Manchester colleagues added an extra twist: They conducted their version of the marshmallow test online to test the effectiveness compared to lab-based versions of the experiment. (Prior results from similar online studies have been mixed.) “Given face-to-face testing restrictions during the COVID pandemic, this, to our knowledge, represents the first cooperative marshmallow study to be conducted online, thereby adding to the growing body of literature concerning the validity of remote testing methods,” they wrote.

The type of treat was chosen by each child’s parents, ensuring it was a favorite: chocolate, candy, biscuits, and marshmallows, mostly, although three kids loved potato chips, fruit, and nuts, respectively. Parents were asked to set up the experiment in a quiet room with minimal potential distractions, outfitted with a webcam to monitor the experiment. Each child was shown a video of a “confederate child” who either clearly promised not to eat the treat or more ambiguously suggested they might succumb and eat their treat. (The confederate child refrained from eating the treat in both conditions, although the participant child did not know that.)

New twist on marshmallow test shows power of a promise Read More »

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How the language of job postings can attract rule-bending narcissists

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Why it matters

Companies write job postings carefully in hopes of attracting the ideal candidate. However, they may unknowingly attract and select narcissistic candidates whose goals and ethics might not align with a company’s values or long-term success. Research shows that narcissistic employees are more likely to behave unethically, potentially leading to legal consequences.

While narcissistic traits can lead to negative outcomes, we aren’t saying that companies should avoid attracting narcissistic applicants altogether. Consider a company hiring a salesperson. A firm can benefit from a salesperson who is persuasive, who “thinks outside the box,” and who is “results-oriented.” In contrast, a company hiring an accountant or compliance officer would likely benefit from someone who “thinks methodically” and “communicates in a straightforward and accurate manner.”

Bending the rules is of particular concern in accounting. A significant amount of research examines how accounting managers sometimes bend rules or massage the numbers to achieve earnings targets. This “earnings management” can misrepresent the company’s true financial position.

In fact, my co-author Nick Seybert is currently working on a paper whose data suggests rule-bender language in accounting job postings predicts rule-bending in financial reporting.

Our current findings shed light on the importance of carefully crafting job posting language. Recruiting professionals may instinctively use rule-bender language to try to attract someone who seems like a good fit. If companies are concerned about hiring narcissists, they may want to clearly communicate their ethical values and needs while crafting a job posting, or avoid rule-bender language entirely.

What still isn’t known

While we find that professional recruiters are using language that attracts narcissists, it is unclear whether this is intentional.

Additionally, we are unsure what really drives rule-bending in a company. Rule-bending could happen due to attracting and hiring more narcissistic candidates, or it could be because of a company’s culture—or a combination of both.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jonathan Gay is Assistant Professor of Accountancy at the University of Mississippi.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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