Do teenage boys pick their nose? How often and why? Is it pathological?
A couple of psychiatrists investigated how often high school boys engage in nose picking. Lu and Tirth discuss this informative medical survey on S01E02 of the Recreational Science podcast (timecode 22:50):
Tirth: The title of this study is, and you may need a dictionary for this, “A preliminary survey of rhinotillexomania in an adolescent sample.”
Lu: I don’t understand what any of that means.
Tirth: Rhinotillexomania is a recent term coined to describe compulsive nose picking, so this is a survey of compulsive nose picking behavior in adolescence.
Lu: Okay. I see.
Tirth: This study is from 2000 and it is in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Lu: Great journal.
Tirth: Great journal. Okay, here’s the method: “we studied nose picking behavior in a sample of 200 adolescents from four urban schools.” This study was actually conducted in India, in a big city in India. “The students were exhorted to answer the questions responsibly and honestly. Confidentiality was assured. Doubts about the meaning of any questions, if raised, were clarified.” And then it says, this is the important point. “In our experience, every institution has students who are pranksters. Therefore, a question deliberately inserted into the questionnaire was,” and I quote, “‘do you occasionally eat the nasal matter that you have picked?’ We considered that students who complete the questionnaire with mischievous responses would be likely to respond positively to this question.”
Lu: Ah…clever. Clever. See, this is the thing about psychology that I think biologists don’t understand, which is you have to be a genius to do psychological studies. You got to come up with very creative ways to get what you want out of people.
Tirth: Right. I would take the opposite tack on this, okay? I think this question is flawed because I’ll tell you right off the bat, having been a 14-year-old boy myself, a non-zero percent of my classmates would have answered this question “yes” and they would not have been lying.
Lu: Okay. Wow.
Tirth: They did occasionally eat the nasal matter that they picked.
Lu: 14-year-olds?
Tirth: Yeah, I mean 10-year-olds, 14-year-olds, just boys. Lu, this is a safe space. How many boogers have you eaten in your life?
Lu: None.
Tirth: No, it can’t be less than five.
Lu: This is absolutely not a safe space. We’re recording this and it’s going to go out.
Tirth: This is the safest space it can be, man.
Lu: Absolutely none. Why would you? You sound like you’ve eaten some.
Tirth: I have, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Lu: I see. What do they taste like?
Tirth: Uh, they’re a little sour and salty.
Lu: Sour. God.
Tirth: Anyway, moving on. The survey given to the students has 25 questions on it: “please indicate your age,” “please indicate your sex,” and “in your opinion, what percentage of persons in the population pick their noses?” Then it says, “on average, how often a day do you pick your nose?” Then it gets into the meat of the matter. It says, “why do you pick your nose?” And there’s a bunch of reasons here: “to unclog your nasal passages,” “to relieve discomfort or itch,” “for cosmetic reasons,” “for personal hygiene,” “out of habit,” and “for pleasure.”
Lu: Oh… okay. All right, I can’t wait to hear the responses.
Tirth: And then it goes on to even more questions: “how do you pick your nose, using your fingers, using an object such as a pencil?” And then it says, “Do you occasionally eat the nasal matter that you have picked?” And then, this is the heart of the matter: “has your nasal picking ever resulted in problems such as nose bleeds, social embarrassment? Do you believe that nose picking is a bad habit? Do you consider that you have a serious nose picking problem?”
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: Then it also asks them about other compulsive habits: “are you in the habit of biting your nails, scratching yourself in a specific spot, pulling out your hair? Has anybody including you yourself considered that you have a psychiatric disorder?”
Lu: Mmm.
Tirth: And that’s the whole questionnaire. So now, remember, 200 students took this. Do you want to guess what the response rate was?
Lu: Now you said they were exhorted…
Tirth: They were.
Lu: …to answer these questions. What does that mean exactly? Did you check the methods section?
Tirth: They don’t say.
Lu: They don’t say. Okay. I’m going to guess it’s pretty high. I’m going to say 70%.
Tirth: You picked too low, my friend. It’s 100%.
Lu: Wow. Okay. We really should…
Tirth: This is unprecedented.
Lu: …we really should figure out what method they used to exhort them. Is it exhort or extort?
Tirth: It says exhort, but it could be a very convenient typo. We don’t know.
Lu: We don’t know.
Tirth: Here are the final numbers: about 29% of the students said that they were picking their nose to unclog their nasal passages.
Lu: Makes sense.
Tirth: 31% said they wanted to relieve discomfort or an itch. 34% said this was for personal hygiene. And then 12% said they were doing it for pleasure. And 22% said this was out of habit.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: Then, as far as the methods used to pick the nose, a staggering 80.5% of the kids said they use their fingers.
Lu: Seems low to me, honestly.
Tirth: But disturbingly, 4.5% said they were using a pencil to pick.
Lu: Which end of the pencil?
Tirth: It doesn’t specify. But get this, the students reported nose picking 8.4 occasions per day.
Lu: Wow.
Tirth: Nose picking behavior at a frequency of greater than five times a day was reported by 31% of the sample.
Lu: How do you know this is accurate?
Tirth: Well, it’s all self-reported, of course.
Lu: Yeah, but do people really keep track of how many times they pick their nose?
Tirth: Well, maybe the same methods that they use to exhort them into finishing the survey were applied to make sure they were not lying. One can only speculate.
Lu: See, a real experiment, and you know, I have a bit of background in psychology. This is how the professors I worked with would have done this. They would make the survey so long that it would take 24 hours to complete, and then they would record the students and actually count how many times they pick their nose. That’s how you do it. That’s how you make sure you get the correct answer.
Tirth: That’s very smart. It’s very sneaky but smart.
Lu: Exactly. That’s what psychology research is.
Tirth: But get this, 7.6% of the kids picked their nose more than 20 times a day…
Lu: Wow, okay.
Tirth: And for concurrent behaviors, about 47% of them said they bit their own nails. 23% were scratching in a specific spot anywhere in the body. 11% of the subjects thought or had been told by significant others that their environment that they had a psychiatric problem.
Lu: Mhm. But like 100% of students responded. I mean, some of them are going to have psychiatric problems, right?
Tirth: Right. But I don’t know what counts as a significant other. Does your best friend telling you’re crazy, does that count as a psychiatric problem? I don’t know.
Lu: Yeah. But I mean, did they do any type of correlation to see if people who’ve been told they have a psychiatric problem are more likely to pick? Is that part of the results?
Tirth: No. That’s one of the future problems. I found this line interesting: “also surprisingly, subjects who reported eating their nasal debris after picking did not differ from the rest of the group on any variables, suggesting that the responses to the question were not motivated by mischief. For this reason, their responses were not screened out of the data reported earlier.”
Lu: What should we take away from this study?
Tirth: I think we should take away from this study that booger eating should not be stigmatized.
Lu: Mhm. Because it’s common.
Tirth: It’s very common and there’s nothing wrong with it.
Article citation:
Andrade & Srihari, 2001. A preliminary survey of rhinotillexomania in an adolescent sample. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/preliminary-survey-rhinotillexomania-adolescent-sample/
You can find Recreational Science on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, Castbox, Audible, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Deezer, TuneIn, and everywhere great podcasts are found.
Leave a Reply