RecSciPod S01E02 full transcript
Timestamps:
- 0:00 Intro
- 2:18 Chappell Roan; check yourself before you wreck yourself
- 9:56 Chicken preference study
- 22:50 Nose picking study
- 33:00 What did you learn today, outro
Intro
Tirth: Is there a ghost?
Lu: Maybe. Playing the theme song in my head… Welcome everybody to recreational science. The podcast where we explore creativity in science by examining some of the funniest, wackiest, and most provocative studies ever done. I’m Lu.
Tirth: I’m Tirth. Hey, I thought the tagline was “two trivial scientists discuss trivial science.”
Lu: That is the tagline.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: You’re right. But that’s not the intro, Tirth. You got to stick to the script.
Tirth: Sorry.
Lu: You just threw me off the script.
Tirth: Oh no. What will we do? What will we do?
Lu: Right away. Uh… Let’s get back on track. All right?
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Listeners, please join us on our quest to the unbound horizons of human innovation on the ship we call the scientific enterprise. What do you think?
Tirth: I love it.
Lu: Is that what I said last time? I honestly don’t remember.
Tirth: No, you said boundless last time.
Lu: No, I said boundless.
Tirth: You said boundless last time, today you said unbound.
Lu: Oh.
Tirth: Wow, see?
Lu: Okay. I’ll fix it in post.
Tirth: Uh-huh, okay.
Lu: But uh, yeah, good intro, huh?
Tirth: Very good intro.
Chappell Roan; check yourself before you wreck yourself
Lu: Tirth, you might notice I have a new camera.
Tirth: You do.
Lu: I also have a ring light.
Tirth: You do.
Lu: I do. It’s… check it out.
Tirth: Positively glowing. I was going to ask you what your skin care routine is.
Lu: So, the reason I got this camera is so we can do some YouTube videos.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: You know, put this up on YouTube. And you’ve noticed I set it up at an angle. What do you think?
Tirth: I like the angle.
Lu: Yeah. I did it for two reasons.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: One, this is my best angle.
Tirth: I see.
Lu: Uh and number two, is so I can Jim the camera when I need to.
Tirth: You can do what?
Lu: Jim the camera.
Tirth: What does that mean?
Lu: Like Jim from The Office?
Tirth: Oh…
Lu: Just look at the camera. Look, I’ll give you an example.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Tirth, you know, you said you were going to shave for this podcast, but I’m looking at you and you have a full beard. Where exactly did you sh… You know what? Never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.
Tirth: Please. Some say this is the best beard ever.
Lu: Uh-huh. Tirth, uh, you were actually here. You visited me in Palo Alto.
Tirth: I was. Yes.
Lu: I said, I said, “Baby, why don’t you come over? Red wine, supernova.” And you did.
Tirth: I did.
Lu: You came over.
Tirth: How could I resist that call?
Lu: I picked you up in my car.
Tirth: Literally.
Lu: And uh, made you listen to a lot of Chappell Roan in the car.
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: What do you think?
Tirth: I love Chappell Roan. Big fan.
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: Her entire discography.
Lu: Oh, the entire discography?
Tirth: Mhmm. Every single song.
Lu: Every single song. Let’s name some.
Tirth: Um, Chappell Roan, I’m Me.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: Chappell Roan, This is the Summer of Brat.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: Chappell Roan, Chappell, Let’s Go.
Lu: No, no, okay. Okay, look. You clearly don’t know Chappell Roan, okay? You want to know some of my favorite songs?
Tirth: Uh-huh. Hey, these are some deep cuts that I just mentioned, maybe that’s why you don’t know them.
Lu: No, please. Please. I know all the Chappell Roan songs, including…
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: Pink Poodle Express.
Tirth: That’s not a song.
Lu: White Zinfandel Solarity.
Tirth: Not a song.
Lu: Female Casanova.
Tirth: No.
Lu: Hey, I Thought You Were Gay.
Tirth: No, none of these are songs.
Lu: That’s definitely a Chappell Roan song.
Tirth: These all sound like captchas.
Lu: Please Please Me.
Tirth: That’s the Beatles.
Lu: Love Me Do.
Tirth: That’s also the Beatles.
Lu: I Me Mine.
Tirth: I don’t think that’s a song.
Lu: Nowhere Man.
Tirth: That is not the Beatles, I think that’s the Stones.
Lu: Eleanor Rigby.
Tirth: That’s Beatles.
Lu: No, no. A lot of artists have songs called Eleanor Rigby.
Tirth: Is that right?
Lu: It’s a very common name for a song.
Tirth: Name five other artists other than the Beatles that have Eleanor Rigby.
Lu: Okay, I will.
Tirth: Go ahead.
Lu: Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Rebecca Black, and Michael Martin Murphy. Okay? Now, it’s not the same song. It’s not the same song.
Tirth: Rebecca Black’s not even making music anymore. She last made music 15 years ago.
Lu: You don’t know the scene, all right? You don’t know the pop scene, please.
Tirth: I see and you do?
Lu: Of course.
Tirth: I think we need a community note or a fact check on this.
Lu: That won’t be necessary.
Tirth: I see. So I just…I should just take you at your word because you’re a scientist.
Lu: Exactly.
Tirth: Is that how science works?
Lu: It is. That’s right.
Tirth: Nice, nice Jim look right there.
Lu: Anyways, the reason I bring all this up is I just want to say I’m a huge Chappell Roan fan. And I think the future of pop music is in great hands with the likes of Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Rebecca Black, and Michael Martin Murphy.
Lu: Anyways, you came over because we were going to do a live episode of the podcast.
Tirth: We were.
Lu: But uh, we didn’t, we didn’t do that.
Tirth: I was busy.
Lu: Although we did set up my living room to look like we were doing a podcast and took a picture for Instagram.
Tirth: We did. That picture was a hit.
Lu: Which uh, yeah, listeners you can find on Instagram @RecSciPod. And then what else did we do? Oh, we went to one of my favorite Mexican restaurants. It was quite a, it was quite the hole-in-the-wall. What’d you think of that food?
Tirth: I really liked it. It was greasy, it was a little spicy, but it was delicious. And I’ll say the, uh, the prices were not quite hole-in-the-wall. I don’t want to name the place. I don’t want to give them free publicity.
Lu: And I’m actually having a little bit of regret about that. Because I remember like the day after you left, that there’s an even better, even more hole-in-the-wall restaurant, Mexican restaurant that I really like and it’s really cheap.
Tirth: No, how does that work? You told me this was the best hole-in-the-wall place ever.
Lu: I forgot. I forgot. Look, let me just tell you about it. Next time we’ll go, okay?
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: This place is so hole-in-the-wall, it doesn’t even have a name.
Tirth: No.
Lu: I think it’s just called Tacos.
Tirth: No, it’s not.
Lu: I honestly think it’s just called Tacos. It’s in East Palo Alto. It’s by the IKEA. Locals will know what I’m talking about. They have a fantastic menu, huge menu, super authentic, lots of different tacos. They do have something on their menu called the Mexican pizza, which is a little gimmicky. I didn’t try it.
Tirth: Wait…
Lu: But let me tell you, Tirth, the best item to get from there is the Doritos Locos Tacos.
Tirth: Okay, okay. It is, it is freaking Taco Bell.
Lu: Everybody should get the Doritos Locos Tacos.
Tirth: No, no, no. I like the Doritos Locos Tacos Supreme. There’s a…
Lu: That’s not a…
Tirth: Listen, listen, listen, this is not some well-kept secret. I know this place. I’ve been to this place many times.
Lu: No, please.
Tirth: In fact…
Lu: This is something only locals would know about.
Tirth: In fact, I patronize this place so much um, that I have a loyalty account with them. I’m a loyal customer of this place.
Lu: I don’t think so. I don’t think they have the information systems capability for keeping track of loyalty customers. This is a hole-in-the-wall operation.
Tirth: No, no, no, no, no. I think they’re just not doing it for you. Maybe they just don’t like you.
Lu: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Hope you enjoyed that joke. I’m dusting off an old chestnut here. That was an old joke from my stand-up comedy days.
Tirth: Blissfully over now.
Lu: Blissfully over? What does that mean?
Tirth: Your stand-up comedy days are blissfully over.
Lu: No, please. Best days of my life.
Tirth: If this was one of your jokes, I can only imagine what other stuff you inflicted upon your poor listeners and audience members.
Lu: Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay, look. Tirth, what’s the one piece of advice I always gave you in grad school?
Tirth: Um, be nice to people.
Lu: No. No. No. What, who cares? No, the one piece of advice I always gave you during grad school is check yourself…
Tirth: Before you wreck yourself.
Lu: Before you wreck yourself.
Tirth: You did say that.
Lu: That’s right.
Tirth: That is very true.
Lu: Yes. You thought I wasn’t funny during my stand-up comedy days?
Tirth: You were quite funny. Listen, you were quite funny in your grad school days.
Lu: Tirth, look. In college, you know I grew up in Texas, right?
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: Went to college in Texas.
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: In college, every third Friday night, I would drive down to the border, the Mexican border, where there’s a little club, and I would do stand up for like five minutes.
Tirth: What was the name of the club?
Lu: It doesn’t matter. Look, the locals loved it, all right? They loved it. They would always laugh.
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: Point and laugh. And they even gave me a nickname.
Tirth: What was your nickname?
Lu: They called me El Chino.
Tirth: El Chino.
Lu: El Chino. Yeah.
Tirth: Cuz you wore, let me guess, cuz you wore Chino pants.
Lu: Who knows, who knows how they come up with these nicknames. But yeah, I was super popular. I started performing under that nickname, El Chino. People loved it, man.
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: All right? So check yourself…
Tirth: Before I wreck myself.
Lu: Before you wreck yourself.
Tirth: I see.
Lu: Of course, I also had to perform in Spanish because uh…
Tirth: How’s your Spanish? Let me, let me hear it.
Lu: Tirth. Tirth, please. What did I just say? Check yourself…
Tirth: Oh, that’s what I’m doing. Listen, listen, I was about to assume that your Spanish is not good. But I was like, maybe I should check myself before I wreck myself.
Lu: Okay. Tirth, listen to how well I can roll my Rs. Rrr. Rrr. Now you tell me if I’m good at Spanish. All right? You tell me. Hold up, you know what? I’ll do you one better. I’ll do you one better. Give me one second.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: This is going to be for YouTube.
Tirth: Okay. Wow, Lu has a mustache on.
Lu: Quiero ver bailar tu pelo, quiero ser tu ritmo. Que le enseñes a mi boca, tus lugares favoritos.
Tirth: Wow.
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: I don’t even know what to say.
Lu: Yeah. You tell me. Can I speak Spanish?
Tirth: Muy bien. Sí.
Lu: Exactly.
Tirth: Exactamente.
Lu: Gracias. Gracias.
Tirth: De nada. De nada.
Lu: Ay ay ay ay ay.
Lu: All right, Tirth, is it uh, do you think it’s time for science?
Tirth: It’s time for science, man. Let’s do it.
Chicken preference study
Lu: So, before I start, there’s something I got to address.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: People have been coming up to me on the streets and saying, “Hey Lu, you say your podcast is an exploration of creativity in science. What the hell does that exactly mean?” And here’s my answer.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Listeners, good science is about rigorously following the scientific method, right?
Tirth: Mhmm.
Lu: Great science is about creativity and innovation. Good science is about answering questions. Great science is about asking questions. Great science is about asking questions no one else is asking. And that’s exactly what we’re doing on this podcast. We’re exploring people who ask questions that no one else is asking. The title of my paper today…
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: Is…
Tirth: Go ahead.
Lu: Chickens prefer beautiful humans.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: The question this group asked is if you train chickens to prefer the average looking human and then you show them pictures of uglier or more beautiful humans, will they react correspondingly?
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: This paper was published in 2002 in the journal Nature. No, sorry, sorry. In the journal Human Nature. Which actually brings me to my first criticism because I actually don’t think they’re studying human nature.
Tirth: I mean in a way they are, right? Because they’re grading people as being ugly or beautiful.
Lu: Yeah, but they’re asking the chickens for their opinion. So I think they’re actually studying chicken nature.
Tirth: They should retitle, rename the journal.
Lu: Actually, Chicken Nature is a journal. It’s um, it’s an internal publication of the Tyson Chicken Farms in Little Rock, Arkansas. Yeah, they don’t accept outside submissions.
Tirth: Outside submissions.
Lu: Yeah. I tried. I tried submitting to them once.
Tirth: Oh I see. Wow. What was your study? What was your study about?
Lu: I did a study where I examined the physics of why reheated, microwaved fried chicken batter gets soggy.
Tirth: Okay. Wow.
Lu: Yeah, it was a little recreational science of my own. They wouldn’t even read it.
Tirth: Is that right? Should we expect to hear about this in a future episode?
Lu: No, I told you, it’s not published. The chicken nature people, they won’t even read it.
Tirth: Maybe you should submit it to Human Nature then.
Lu: Oh, I should. I should. Or Nature Physics as a backup.
Tirth: Sure. Wait, Human Nature, hold up, hold up. Human Nature, not to be confused with Human Genetics, am I right?
Lu: Very, very different journals.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So, this paper, like I said, they trained chickens to be attracted to average human faces and then asked the chickens what they thought of uglier or more beautiful faces. So, the subjects of this paper are six chickens, four female and two male.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So, they trained these chickens, this gets a little bit technical, so bear with me, but basically, they took average human female and male faces and show them to the chickens.
Tirth: Mhmm.
Lu: The chickens were deprived of food for like 12 hours.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: And then if they pecked at the correct face, they received a food reward.
Tirth: Wait, what does it mean an average face? What does that mean?
Lu: So, they took, you’ve seen those faces where it’s like the average face of a country?
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: They combine all the little pixels.
Tirth: Yes, and average the pixels.
Lu: Basically, they took pictures of 35 faces, female or male, and averaged them.
Tirth: And then what does it mean if the chicken pecks at the right face?
Lu: Great question, Tirth. Great question. So, these people, remember I said they have four female chickens and two male chickens?
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: They trained the female chickens to preferentially peck at the male face, the male human face.
Tirth: Of course they did.
Lu: and the male chickens to preferentially peck at the female face.
Tirth: Of course they did. They’re making a lot of assumptions about chicken sexual orientation, by the way.
Lu: Exactly. So, yeah, so let’s just pause there for a second and think about what that means exactly.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: These people care more about heteronormativity than conspecific relations.
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: They care more, they’re more concerned about homosexuality than bestiality. Okay?
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: Let’s think about that. By the way, you know, I know some people think that our first episode was kind of raunchy.
Tirth: That’s true.
Lu: And they assumed that was maybe the peak of our raunchiness. But guess what? No, it’s not. All right? Every episode, here on out, is going to get more and more raunchy, okay? You think this podcast is called Recreational Science? It’s not. It’s actually called Procreational Science. We tricked you. We tricked you, listeners. Welcome to Procreational Science.
Tirth: We’re cranking it up.
Lu: That’s right. Okay, you get the idea, right? So female chickens, if they peck at the average male face, they get a food reward. If they peck at the female face, they don’t get a reward.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So then they took these two faces and tried to generate a set of seven faces that range from most feminine to most masculine.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So the first thing they did was average the average female and the average male face, you know, averaged those two together to generate like an androgynous face.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So that’s the face in the middle.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: And then they extrapolated from the most average face to the average female face. And then they extrapolated a little bit more to make that face even more feminine.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: And then again to make an even more feminine face.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So, you have the average human face, average female face, slightly more feminine female face, even more feminine female face. And then the same thing on the male side. So you have a total of seven faces ranging from most masculine to most feminine.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: And they ask the chickens to peck at these faces to register which ones they preferred.
Tirth: Oh my god.
Lu: So as control, as sort of a calibrator, they got 14 undergraduate students, human students, seven male, seven female, and asked them to rate these seven faces on a scale of 1 to 10 for like the face they’re most sexually attracted to.
Tirth: This is basically a precursor to Facebook. This is how Facebook was started. It was hot or not, essentially.
Lu: Mhmm. You want to hear the results?
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: So I’ll tell you the human results first. What the humans said.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: The male and the female responses are actually pretty much the same. So for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just describe the female results, okay?
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: The female students, so there were three male faces, right? Hyper masculine, slightly more masculine, average masculine.
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: Those they found the most attractive. And the three female faces they found basically not at all attractive.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: The three female faces, zero in terms of attractiveness. The androgynous face is slightly better than those three female faces. Slightly better, but the average male face, the next most masculine one, is a lot more attractive than the average human face.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: And then the slightly more masculine one than that is slightly more attractive. And then it sort of just peaks out at there.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: The most masculine face is not quite as attractive. It’s a little bit below the second most masculine face.
Tirth: Right. Okay.
Lu: The female chickens…
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: pecked at these faces in the exact same frequency.
Tirth: No, they didn’t.
Lu: Yes, they did. The two when graphed side by side, the curves look exactly the same.
Tirth: No…
Lu: I don’t know if you can see this. I’ll show you.
Tirth: Oh wow. This is very tight, man.
Lu: I’ll put the figure up on YouTube. But one, two, three, those are the female faces. Number four is the average face, slightly more attractive than number three. And then the average male face is much more attractive.
Tirth: And then it dips off. Right, I see it. And then for the chickens, it plateaus.
Lu: Exactly.
Tirth: But the Y axis says proportion of something. I didn’t see the whole thing.
Lu: Proportion of responses.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So it would be either like the number of pecks, like the proportion of pecks or the like the rating.
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: So the interesting thing is, for both the chickens and the humans…
Tirth: They prefer the same person, same face.
Lu: Exactly. They prefer…So, the average male face for them, both of them is pretty attractive.
Tirth: Uh-huh.
Lu: The average human face is
Tirth: Yeah, it’s okay, so-so attractive.
Lu: Yeah, it’s much less, much less attractive. And the slightly more masculine face is slightly more attractive. It’s the exact same pattern. Isn’t that crazy?
Tirth: It’s crazy. Well, it’s something.
Lu: It’s certainly something.
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: What do you think? What do you think that something is?
Tirth: I… nature. Human nature, I guess.
Lu: Human… or chicken nature.
Tirth: Chicken nature. Yeah. Or just nature. Mhmm. Maybe this thing should have been in just Nature because it covers humans and chickens.
Lu: I totally agree. Could not agree more.
Tirth: How did they get informed consent from the chickens?
Lu: I think if the chicken eats the food, I think, you know, that’s implied consent.
Tirth: Uh, seems a little dicey. What they could have done, you know, they could have gone to bird lawyer. I know one. Charlie Day. Charlie from uh, It’s Always Sunny in…
Lu: Always Sunny. Uh-huh. He’s a bird lawyer?
Tirth: Yes, he is. This is a well-known fact, man. Look it up.
Lu: Mhmm.
Tirth: Hey, also, you know Rick and Morty, this is a show you and I both like.
Lu: I enjoy it.
Tirth: There’s a side character called Bird Person.
Lu: Oh yes.
Tirth: You think this study is like the origin story of Bird Person?
Lu: Very possible. Very possible. Yeah. That’s why he married Tammy.
Tirth: Yeah, exactly. Something to think about.
Lu: Which ended poorly for him.
Tirth: Very poorly. Spoiler alert.
Lu: Yeah. So, you might be wondering now what’s the significance of this paper?
Tirth: I’ve been wondering that from the first, the title, really.
Lu: Well, this paper suggests that human preferences arise from like a general property of nervous systems, rather than like face-specific adaptations. At least that’s what they claim, right? Which kind of makes sense.
Tirth: Right.
Lu: It suggests that humans didn’t evolve only to decode like information from faces, right? Cuz there’s this theory, there’s a couple of theories. They talk about this in the paper. The first theory is the mate quality hypothesis. These are theories on why we find certain faces more attractive.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So the mate quality hypothesis is that humans, we receive a signal from the face about like the health or the quality of the mate. And we’ve evolved/adapted to respond to that.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: And that’s why we find certain people more attractive. The alternative hypothesis or the competing hypothesis is something called the bias hypothesis, which is that attractiveness may be due to biases that are inherent in the nervous system.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: And that would predict that really any nervous system can develop preferences for human faces, which they showed here. Sort of.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: What do you think of the paper overall?
Tirth: Um, I liked it a lot.
Lu: Mhmm. A lot to think about.
Tirth: A lot to think about. Um, I’m going to be pondering this over as I sleep tonight. You know, I’ll think about attraction and…
Lu: As you stare into the face of your lovely fiance?
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: You’ll be wondering if I peck at her, will I get a food reward?
Tirth: If she was a chicken. You know, that’s the other thing they should have done, man. They should have taken these undergrads and they should have shown them pictures of chickens and see if they would have rated chickens on a scale of… I mean, that would have been the perfect experiment.
Lu: That would be a Human Nature paper.
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: Can you train humans to be…That’s actually a great idea. I’m not even kidding. That experiment absolutely should have been done.
Tirth: Well listen, this has a lot of practical value, right? For example, if you’re a big chicken company, um let’s say you’re Chick-fil-A or Tyson Farms or whatever, by the way, please give us money, we’re shouting you out. Um…You want to pick the best chickens, right? So you can get the best eggs, you can get the best meat. There’s a lot of utility to this.
Lu: And you think more attractive chickens produce more attractive eggs, better tasting eggs?
Tirth: Uh this is a one hypothesis. There’s only… I mean, we’d have to test it. We don’t know.
Lu: We’ll test it and we’ll talk about it on this pod.
Tirth: Right. Okay. Maybe we can draw up some interest and get some funding for a side project.
Lu: Fantastic.
Nose picking study
Lu: Alright Tirth, you want to move on to your paper?
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: And please, please just keep going because I’m I’m going to do some visual schtick for YouTube. Just don’t mind me. Just keep going.
Tirth: Okay. Okay. You do you, man. You do you. Listen, you know, you were going on and on about what great science is and isn’t and so on and so forth. I want to add a qualifying statement to this, okay? Or I mean, it’s not a qualifying statement, sorry. It’s just an additional statement what great science is. Great science is something that anyone should be able to sniff out. It has to pass the smell test.
Lu: The smell test. Okay. I agree. I agree.
Tirth: Okay. Along those lines, my paper is, here’s the title. You ready?
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: The title is, and you may need a dictionary for this, by the way. Oh wow, there’s a cigarette in your mouth. Wow, you’re so cool. Okay, the title is “A preliminary survey of rhinotillexomania in an adolescent sample.”
Lu: Sorry, say that again?
Tirth: A preliminary survey of rhinotillexomania in an adolescent sample. Question number one, what is…
Lu: I don’t understand what any of that means.
Tirth: All right, rhinotillexomania is a recent term coined to describe compulsive nose picking.
Lu: Oh, yes. Okay. Mhmm.
Tirth: So this is a survey of compulsive nose picking behavior in adolescence.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: This study is from 2000 and it is in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Lu: Great journal.
Tirth: Great journal. Okay, I’m going to read you some excerpts, choice excerpts from this study, okay?
Lu: Go ahead.
Tirth: Okay, here’s the method: “we studied nose picking behavior in a sample of 200 adolescents from four urban schools.”
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: So this study was actually conducted in India, in a big city in India.
Lu: I was going to ask. So, what city in India?
Tirth: Uh, Bangalore. Do you know your Indian geography?
Lu: I do not.
Tirth: Okay, it’s in the south.
Lu: It’s in the south. I was going to say south.
Tirth: Okay, sure you were. Yes, you were. So let me just go into the methods. Just one more thing I wanted to say. I’m reading this straight from the paper here now. “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?”
Lu: Uh-huh.
Tirth: “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, being 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: Okay. Anyway, moving on. So they actually, in this paper, they’ve very helpfully included the survey that they gave to the students. There’s like 25 questions on this. I’m going to read you some questions for you, okay? It starts off by, “please indicate your age,” “please indicate your sex.” And then it says, “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. It says, “How do you pick your nose, using your fingers, using an object such as a pencil?”
Lu: Oh.
Tirth: And then it says, “Do you occasionally eat the nasal matter that you have picked?” And then it goes on to ask them, you know, this is the heart of the, you know, 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. So it says, “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.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: Okay. So now, remember, 200 students took this, okay?
Lu: Yes.
Tirth: 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?
Tirth: Mmm, what do you think it means?
Lu: Did they say? Did you check the methods section?
Tirth: They don’t say. No.
Lu: They don’t say. Okay. I’m going to guess, 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’s…It says exhort, but it could be a very convenient typo. We don’t know.
Lu: We don’t know.
Tirth: Yes. We can email the authors.
Lu: Like I said, we should definitely email all the authors we talk about.
Tirth: Okay, so now I’m going to break up before I get into the final numbers, you know, based on the questions I just posed to you, based on the survey. I’m going to give you some choice highlights, okay? Remember they asked them about reasons for nose picking? 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, 80.5%, 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. It could be the eraser or it could be…
Lu: Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. No judging.
Tirth: Okay, so these are the methods and the reasons. Um, they found out that this sample reported nose picking 8.4 occasions per day.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: So they’re picking their nose eight times a day. 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…
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.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: 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…
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: Mhmm.
Tirth: Um, now I have a question about this. 9th graders, you know, they they have no filter. I don’t know if you know this, Lu, but um…
Lu: They have no filter, but also like 100% of people responded. And so like…I mean, some of them are going to have psychiatric problems, right?
Tirth: Right. But I don’t know, like what does, 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, there has to be some sort of correlation, right? 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. No.
Lu: This is just…
Tirth: Here they’re very focused. They’re locked into the kids.
Lu: This is just reporting of 200 high school boys, whether they pick their nose, whether they might have a psychiatric problem, whether they scratch a certain spot on their body…
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: With no correlation amongst the different factors they looked at.
Tirth: No, I mean, they speculate.
Lu: I see.
Tirth: Um, actually here I found this line interesting, okay? “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: Okay. What should we take away from this study?
Tirth: Um, I think we should take away from this study that booger eating should not be stigmatized.
Lu: Mhmm. Because it’s common.
Tirth: It’s very common and there’s nothing wrong with it.
Lu: Yes. Do whatever. Cool. Is that it, Tirth?
Tirth: That’s it, man.
What did you learn today?
Lu: All right. Well, that’s the end of this episode, episode number two. Tirth, what’d you learn today?
Tirth: I learned that humans and chickens may be more alike than I thought. And that I should feel, I should feel more guilt about eating chicken.
Lu: Yeah. Like if that chicken had a crush on you and you ate it, that would be very disturbing.
Tirth: Pretty crushing.
Lu: Very disturbing.
Tirth: Uh-huh. What did you learn today, Lu?
Lu: I learned that boogers taste sour. And that you might have a condition. You might need a uh, you might need a proton pump inhibitor for your nose… Okay guys, thanks for listening and we will see you next time.
Tirth: Bye.
