RecSciPod S01E11 full transcript
Timestamps:
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:55 Dave talk; Tirth’s beef
- 5:38 Placebo studies
- 21:02 Dog smelling study
- 29:52 What did you learn today, outro
Intro
Tirth: Game on, PBS, come get me, Elmo.
Lu: Hater, man, you’re a hater. Welcome everybody to another episode of 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: And I’m Tirth.
Lu: Ladies and gentlemen, please join us on this journey, because we are two laughable scientists discussing laughable science. It’s going to be a good time. That’s our new tagline, by the way.
Tirth: I was going to say I love it. I love it. I was just – before you even said it, I was going to be like, that should be our tagline.
Lu: Yeah, I figured it’s funnier…
Tirth: Yeah, I think I agree.
Lu: …than two trivial scientists discovering trivial science. We can also rotate it.
Tirth: It’s okay. But I like this one.
Lu: Yeah, every other episode, we changeup the tagline.
Dave Talk
Lu: Tirth, I thought today we should just jump right into the science. But actually, before we do that, I want to bring back very quickly a fan-favorite segment of the show. All the way back from episode one.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Dave Talk.
Tirth: Dave Talk. That’s right. The Tale of two Daves.
Lu: Fan-favorite segment. For those who are new to the show or haven’t listened to episode one yet, Dave Talk is a segment where we talk about two Daves, like Tirth said, because during our PhD, both Tirth and I had thesis advisors named Dave.
Tirth: That’s right.
Lu: You know, some people say it’s just a coincidence. I say it’s kismet. I say it’s the universe’s way of ensuring the existence of this very popular segment on our podcast, Dave Talk.
Tirth: And by the way, by the way, I want to add both Daves are very nice people, very smart…
Lu: Great scientists, great people. I saw my Dave a few days ago, actually. Yeah, he was in town. He was visiting family in California and we went out to lunch.
Tirth: Wait, did you take him to the hole in the wall place?
Lu: No, please. Please. No, no, no. That’s only for you, okay?
Tirth: I see.
Lu: Dave is a very classy person.
Tirth: I see. So where did you take him?
Lu: Please, please. Sushi, of course.
Tirth: Of course.
Lu: Of course, obviously, because you know, we’re both, like I said, classy, cultured, sophisticated, cultured people. Yeah, so of course. Neither of us mind the taste of sushi. So of course, we had to go get some sushi.
Tirth: Wow. What did you guys talk about?
Lu: We talked about, you know, sophisticated things like classical music…
Tirth: World travels.
Lu: World travels…
Tirth: Abstract art.
Lu: Postmodern art, of course, things us sophisticated people talk about it. You wouldn’t know.
Tirth: I wouldn’t know. I’m a bumpkin. I’m a bumpkin, of course, you know. I wouldn’t know. How would I know?
Lu: When you meet up with your Dave, you probably talk about what? Football?
Tirth: Sometimes.
Lu: Taco Bell? What do you guys talk about?
Tirth: Yeah. Taco Bell and football. That’s exactly right. That’s what we talk about, man.
Lu: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Well, your Dave is also a very sophisticated man, but he’s got to come down to your level.
Tirth: Yeah, he dumbs it down for me. Dumbs it down for me. One of his many great qualities.
Lu: Makes sense.
Tirth: Hey, but I have a very important question for you: does your Dave listen to our podcast?
Lu: I hope not. I really hope not.
Tirth: Because as you and I both know, my Dave does watch the clips that are on Instagram.
Lu: That’s true. Yeah, he does like them. But it’s unclear if he actually watches them.
Tirth: He does. I asked him because I saw him at a conference. Yes, like you, I saw my Dave about two months ago at a conference.
Lu: Oh, great.
Tirth: We had a good time. And I asked him and he said, oh, yeah, I see you… when the clips show up on Instagram, I see them.
Lu: So has that changed your behavior on this podcast, do you think?
Tirth: Of course not. I think I owe it to the people, okay? All the grateful listeners that come up to you on the street corners.
Lu: They always come up to me.
Tirth: Yeah, right. I owe it to them, Lu. I have to present my most authentic version on this show.
Lu: I see. I see.
Tirth: I owe it to you and I owe it to Dave.
Lu: Good. Good. Good. Glad you feel that way. See, if my Dave were to listen to this show, I think I would change things up because I wouldn’t want him to think that all of the training he provided me led to this. I think he’d be very disappointed.
Tirth: I see.
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: Well, I hope someday in the future, he gets to listen to it and you’re proven wrong.
Lu: I sincerely hope not. OK. Good. Good Dave Talk today.
Tirth: Good Dave Talk today. Hey, I’m going to bring, not a segment but a concept back from another previous episode. OK?
Lu: Oh, yeah.
Tirth: Yeah. Speaking of traveling, meeting up with people, I’m going to talk about beef. I have very minor beef with you.
Lu: Me?
Tirth: Yes. You came down to Los Angeles about two weeks ago.
Lu: Oh, yeah.
Tirth: Yeah. You didn’t even say hello.
Lu: No.
Tirth: You didn’t even wave at me.
Lu: No.
Tirth: We didn’t meet up.
Lu: No. No, I saw you from a distance. Didn’t want to say hi.
Tirth: See, exactly. That’s my reason for this beef, this minor beef.
Lu: No, this was planned. No, no, this was agreed upon, I think, beforehand. Well, your fiancee was also visiting. I didn’t want to take you away from her.
Tirth: Wow. So gracious.
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: So gracious.
Lu: Because, you know, you only see her, what, two times a year these days?
Tirth: Please, once a month at least. In fact, I’m going there tomorrow. Please.
Lu: You don’t have to lie…
Lu: All right, Tirth, should we get to the meat of the podcast?
Tirth: Yeah, let’s do it.
Expensive placebos work better
Lu: Tirth, I have a question for you. Placebos, yay or nay?
Tirth: Yay.
Lu: Yay. You’re a big fan? That makes sense. That makes sense. Because I’ve heard a lot of people say that neurology itself is one big placebo. Is that true?
Tirth: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. These people are very ignorant. They don’t know the incredible depth, complexity, and the richness of neurology. An incredibly complex field of medicine.
Lu: Very expensive drugs that do nothing. Is that correct?
Tirth: No, no, no. Absolutely not. I think you’re reading, your views are very outdated. The opinion used to be neurology, all it does is diagnose and adios. That is absolutely false. We treat many, many conditions. We manage many, many very complex chronic conditions.
Lu: Yes, that don’t get better.
Tirth: Some do get better. A lot don’t get worse.
Lu: About 20% get better, which happens to be the rate of the placebo effect. Today, I wanted to discuss the placebo effect. I think everybody knows what the placebo effect is. Basically, you take a drug that’s inert, like a sugar pill, but it has an effect, like it helps you feel better or whatever.
Tirth: Often because there’s an expectation from the person taking it, that this thing will help them.
Lu: That’s what I was going to ask. What accounts for the placebo effect?
Tirth: I think that’s a big factor in it, that there’s this so-called buy-in.
Lu: It’s like a psychological thing.
Tirth: Yeah, I think that’s probably a huge part of it.
Lu: But I think another part of it is sometimes it can have an actual physiological effect.
Tirth: Makes sense too.
Lu: So for instance, like if you use like an anti-itch ointment, that’s a placebo, so it doesn’t actually do anything, sometimes that can lead the nerves that causes the itch to fire less.
Tirth: Yeah. Right.
Lu: It’s like a psycho-physiological thing.
Tirth: Right.
Lu: The paper I’m presenting today, Tirth, shows that expensive placebos work better.
Tirth: Oh, wow.
Lu: Yes.
Tirth: Okay, so let’s unpack this, okay, before you even get into anything. There’s multiple layers here, right? Because there’s a whole separate phenomenon where things are sometimes priced higher and people automatically assume that they’re better quality just because they’re priced higher.
Lu: Because you’re going after a certain market.
Tirth: Correct.
Lu: And the price is tailored to that market that you’re going for. Yeah, so like food, for instance, like packaged food, sometimes the same factory will make the same food, but package them differently and sell them a different price on it, just to go after different markets.
Tirth: Correct, correct.
Lu: Exactly. So that’s one of the rationale behind the studies I’m presenting. I’m actually presenting three studies today.
Tirth: Okay, wow.
Lu: Yeah, because I did a deep dive on this subject. So the first study is titled “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy.” This was published in 2008 in the Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA.
Tirth: A great journal.
Lu: Which is a good journal, yeah, good journal. This is a double-blinded randomized control trial. So basically here, what they did was they shocked volunteers. These are healthy volunteers. They were able to recruit 82 of them. They paid them $30 and then delivered electric shocks to them, to their wrist.
Tirth: Oh my god.
Lu: At different voltages, ranging from like, you know, not that painful to pretty painful.
Tirth: Basically tase them.
Lu: Yeah, exactly. And they got them to give like a pain rating. And then they gave them this placebo and told them it’s an analgesic, it’s an opioid. And then –
Tirth: Anal-gesic.
Lu: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. And then after they took this placebo, which is just like a sugar pill, they were shocked again at the same voltages. And then they gave a new rating – or they rated the pain again after taking the analgesic. The 82 people were divided into two groups. One group was told that this drug, this new opioid analgesic drug, is very cheap, 10 cents a pill. The other half were told that this is an expensive drug and it costs $2.50 per pill. So what do you think they found?
Tirth: They found that the group that got the $2.50 pill – they’re the same pill?
Lu: Yeah, they’re the same pill and they’re both placebo pills. They’re not even pain killers.
Tirth: Yes. Sugar pills. They rated their post-pill pain as lower than the group that got the cheaper pills.
Lu: Yes. Both placebos worked. Even the cheap one worked, the 10 cents one.
Tirth: Wow.
Lu: But I think that’s sort of a psychological phenomenon, which is participants, they want to be good participants.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: If they think the people running the trial are trying to find that their drug is good, they want to produce results. They want to be hopeful.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: They want to help them out and produce results that are positive.
Tirth: Right.
Lu: So I think that’s part of it. But yeah, the more expensive placebo outperforms the cheaper drug at almost all of the different voltages they were shocked at.
Tirth: Quite impressive.
Lu: The p-value is less than .001.
Tirth: Wow. Okay. Pretty strong. Pretty strong.
Lu: But this outcome here is, the outcome they’re measuring here is too subjective, right? It’s just, hey, rate the pain.
Tirth: I mean, pain scales are very subjective.
Lu: Exactly. So it could be that the placebo actually had an effect and their nerve endings are firing less or whatever in response to the pain. So they’re feeling the pain less or it could just be completely psychological.
Tirth: Expectations… Hey, but I want to add something here. They should have measured another metric. They should have asked them on a scale of 1 to 10, how much pleasure are you getting?
Lu: Oh, oh, oh, and see if that changes. That’s like a control. If the pleasure also changes, then they’re just full of it.
Tirth: Maybe they can do some sort of an overlap of the pain and the pleasure.
Lu: I see, I see. So that’s that study. You know, my criticism again is that it’s completely subjective.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: The outcome they’re measuring. So here comes the second study, which is called “Placebo Effect of Medication Cost in Parkinson Disease: a randomized double blind study.” This was published in 2015 in the journal Neurology. Is that a good journal?
Tirth: Yes. It’s called the “green journal,” because its cover is green.
Lu: I’ll take your word for it. Not too familiar with this journal. Here, they got 12 patients with Parkinson disease.
Tirth: That’s it? 12 patients?
Lu: Uh-huh. For our audience who don’t know, what is sort of the main defect in Parkinson disease?
Tirth: Parkinson’s is what we call a movement disorder. So patients get this resting tremor. They have this rigidity and stiffness in their arms, hands and legs. When they’re walking, they kind of shuffle. Their face looks like it’s kind of frozen.
Lu: What is the general mechanism?
Tirth: General mechanism is loss of this chemical called dopamine in the brain.
Lu: So the main treatment, one of the main treatments for this disease is actually giving people dopamine.
Tirth: Which hasn’t changed, by the way, in like 50 years, like the formulation Carbidopa-Levodopa came out in the 1970s.
Lu: That’s still the gold standard?
Tirth: It’s still the gold standard. There’s different formulations.
Lu: So, in this study, they got the 12 Parkinson’s patients and they were all given the same placebo, which the patients were told was this novel subcutaneous injectable dopamine agonist. Now, half the patients were told that this drug is very cheap. The other half were told that it’s very expensive. And then they assessed the patient’s motor function afterwards. So, not subjective measurements, but actual objective measurements of their motor function, like measuring their brain activity. Or something called a tapping task, which I’m not 100%…
Tirth: It’s basically you ask the patient to tap and you count how many times they’re tapping their foot and their hand. There’s a whole scale called the Uniform Parkinson’s Rating Scale or something like that.
Lu: Oh, the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating. Okay, that’s one of the things they measure.
Tirth: So it’s like a quasi quantifiable metric, but there’s still some subjectivity because someone still has to rate you on these things.
Lu: So what do you think they found?
Tirth: Sensing a trend, I’m sure they found that the patients who thought they were injecting the more expensive drug felt their symptoms improved more, or they probably scored better on the Parkinson’s scale than the patients who thought they were.
Lu: They did. They found measurable improvement in motor function. Yeah, actually in both patients, in both sets of patients, the cheap and expensive placebos, but much more in the expensive placebos. Not quite to the extent of the gold standard, the levodopa, but the expensive was quite close. The effect size of the expensive placebo was about halfway between that of the cheap placebo and the levodopa.
Tirth: Wow.
Lu: So not bad at all. Not bad at all.
Tirth: Nice.
Lu: The third study is called “Expensive seems better: the price of a non-effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy.” This is from 2023 in the journal Cognitive Research…
Tirth: Great journal.
Lu: …Principles and Implications. Yeah. Good journal. Very good journal. So here, they kind of flipped the method on its head.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: They got 56 healthy volunteers. These were Spanish internet users.
Tirth: Why do you say it like it’s perverted?
Lu: No, I didn’t say it’s perverted.
Tirth: What’s that pause? You’re like, Spanish…internet users.
Lu: They’re Spanish internet users. That’s how they’re described in the paper. Here’s how they flipped this method on its head. These participants, the Spanish internet users, were not given the placebo drugs.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Instead, they were given patient charts. 50 patient charts each to review. These fake patients in these charts were given the placebos. So the design is, these patients have this fictitious disease, which they call crises of “Lindsay syndrome.”
Tirth: That’s just like a playbook straight out of Seinfeld or Curb making up…
Lu: Crises of Lindsay Syndrome. What do you think that is?
Tirth: How do you spell it?
Lu: L-I-N-D-S-A-Y.
Tirth: Oh, like Lindsay Lohan.
Lu: Lindsay Lohan.
Tirth: I like to imagine it’s a horrible liver disease.
Lu: Oh.
Tirth: Like your liver like basically explodes.
Lu: Wow.
Tirth: That’s why it’s a crisis.
Lu: During the crises. Yeah. I think it’s like a fungal disease. During the crises, it’s…
Tirth: …It’s all over the place.
Lu: It’s not, yeah.
Tirth: The fungus is everywhere.
Lu: It’s very, very nasty. Very nasty. Or it’s like you get a lot of freckles, which I think Lindsay Lohan would have had. You just get a bloom of freckles. There’s freckles everywhere.
Tirth: Afflicted by the Lindsay syndrome.
Lu: Yes. The crises of Lindsay syndrome. So the 50 patients suffered from the crises of Lindsay syndrome. And 50 of these patients took a fictitious drug called Batatrim. 25 of the 50 patients took this drug.
Tirth: And these are real patients or are these fake patients and fake charts?
Lu: Everything is made up.
Tirth: Okay. Got it.
Lu: So if you are a participant, you receive 50 charts, 50 patients. All of them suffered this crises of Lindsay syndrome. Only 25 – you weren’t giving these statistics. You were just, you know, looking at the charts…
Tirth: Randomly given charts.
Lu: 25 of them received Batatrim.
Tirth: Half of them.
Lu: Yeah. Half of them. And then regardless of whether or not they received Batatrim, 70% of them got better.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: So of the 56 volunteers they got to review these charts, half of them were told that the drug is expensive. Half of the other half were told that the drug Batatrim is cheap. And they were basically told to evaluate, “hey, this drug, do you think it’s effective? And would you administer it in the future?” What do you think they found?
Tirth: Well, I’m sure keeping up with the theme, the group that was given or told that this fake drug for this fake disease, treating the fake patients was more expensive than the other fake drug, they thought that it was more effective and then they would use it again more.
Lu: Yes. Yes, exactly. So, specifically, they were asked, to what extent do you think that Batatrim has helped to stop the crises of Lindsay syndrome of the patients you have seen? And they were asked to give a rating on the scale of 1 to 100. For the cheap drug, the average rating that the participants gave was 20. For the expensive drug, the average rating was 35. Several people gave a rating of like 60 or above. Like two people gave a rating of 90.
Tirth: Super prescribers.
Lu: They thought it was very, very effective.
Tirth: Yeah, in the pocket of a big pharma, fake big pharma.
Lu: And people – actually, this is also kind of interesting: the people in the expensive group also thought that more patients took the drug. Remember only 25 patients took the drug?
Tirth: Right, right.
Lu: For the cheap group, they thought on average 22 patients took the drug, which is pretty good. For the expensive group, they thought on average like 28, 29 took the drug.
Tirth: Wow, about a 10% difference in, I guess, 20% difference in that direction.
Lu: Big difference. I don’t know what that would be, but it’s interesting. Tirth, what do you think?
Tirth: Well, I think two things…
Lu: Three studies, pretty solid evidence. Well, the last one isn’t a trial, but the other two were double blinded, randomized controlled trials.
Tirth: I think the second study to me was probably the most compelling one because patients had a “real chronic condition”. Obviously, I would want to know more stuff just because I’m a neurologist myself, but I think overall, it’s very compelling, right?
Lu: So what is the take home point here? What is the relevance to society? Well, I think, you know the guy, Pharma Bro? What was his name?
Tirth: Martin Shkreli.
Lu: What did he do? He bought like the insulin producing company and jacked up the price?
Tirth: No, it was an anti-parasitic that’s incredibly cheap in Asia, but it’s not available in America because we don’t have that many parasitic diseases. He bought the license to it.
Lu: And he jacked up the price.
Tirth: Yeah, like by a hundred times or something.
Lu: Here’s my take: I think this guy is a hero. I think this guy was trying to make the drug more effective by making it more expensive. I think instead of being thrown…is he in jail?
Tirth: No, no, he’s been out for a while. He’s been out for a while.
Lu: Okay. Well, that’s…
Tirth: He’s actually pretty active on Twitter.
Lu: Okay. Good. Well, I think, you know, he should never have been thrown in jail. I think he should have received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tirth: He’s an American Hero.
Lu: And the Physiology and Medicine Prize.
Tirth: And Economics, maybe.
Lu: And the Economics Prize. Exactly. All three of those.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: Chemistry as well.
Tirth: Sure.
Lu: Throw that on there. Physics. We’ll see.
Tirth: We’ll see. Maybe. Maybe. Need more evidence.
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: You know what he should have done though, Lu? He could have saved himself a lot of trouble. He didn’t even need to buy the license to the drug. Just make sugar pills and jack up the price, and just tell them, this is that parasitic medication.
Lu: Yes. There is a company that makes placebos. That’s where like all the drug companies get their placebos from. They make, I looked it up. They make, I think, almost $5 million a year, making placebos.
Tirth: That’s pretty good.
Lu: We should have gone in on that.
Tirth: That’s a great business.
Lu: That could have been us, man.
Tirth: Genius, man. Genius. Oh man. Too good.
Lu: All right, any other thoughts, Tirth?
Tirth: No.
Lu: I turn it over to you then.
Can people be good dogs?
Tirth: All right. So Lu, for today’s paper, I am going to bring back another favorite theme of this podcast: dogs.
Lu: Oh, okay.
Tirth: We’ve talked about dogs.
Lu: The man of the dogs.
Tirth: Man of the dogs. Exactly. What else do I say? Dogs are better people than people are.
Lu: Oh, is that right?
Tirth: Yeah. We’ve talked about this before. Well, you said it and I agreed. You said it and I agreed.
Lu: I don’t recall.
Tirth: Okay. Go back and listen to all of the recordings.
Lu: Dogs are the best people.
Tirth: Dogs are the best people.
Lu: I see. I agree.
Tirth: Before I reveal the title of this paper, you know, it’s well known that dogs have a very strong sense of smell. They can identify a lot of people, other dogs, other objects just by their smell. They can even find their way home if they’re lost, right?
Lu: Well, they can also sense the earth’s magnetic field.
Tirth: Yeah, that’s probably a big part of it, but okay. But the question is, do humans, can they recognize dogs by their smell?
Lu: Can humans recognize dogs by the dog’s smell?
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: I see.
Tirth: So that’s the title of this paper…
Lu: Are these dogs they’re familiar with?
Tirth: Yes, yes, they are. And I’ll explain it just one second. The title of the paper is “Discrimination of Dog Odors by Humans.”
Lu: Okay, good.
Tirth: This was published in the year 2000.
Lu: So this is asking the question, we said earlier that dogs are the best people. This is asking whether people can make good dogs.
Tirth: Yes.
Lu: Okay, good, good. I like that.
Tirth: Yeah, good question.
Lu: Very creative question. No one else is asking this question.
Tirth: This was published in the Journal of Perception.
Lu: Oh, good journal.
Tirth: In the year 2000. There’s only two authors on this and they’re both from Northern Ireland, the UK. By the way, I’m going to say this ahead of time: even though this is a relatively simple study, I really like the methodology they used. I think this is a fairly sound study.
Lu: Oh, very good.
Tirth: So here’s the methods. They recruited 26 dog owners. They gave them a blanket and they said, “hey, lay this blanket down wherever your dog sleeps in your house and leave it there for three days.” So anything that’s dog odor will be transferred or part of it will be transferred to the blanket. Then they had the participants come bring the blankets back. They mixed them all up. Then they had them do a blind smell test.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: And it was a pair wise test. So each person was given two blankets. One of them was their own dog’s blanket, the other one was someone else’s.
Lu: So 50-50…
Tirth: Yeah. 50-50 chance. And they were asked to guess which blanket belongs to your dog.
Lu: …which blanket belongs to your dog, okay.
Tirth: Before I reveal the results and some other methodologies and why I like this, do you do you want to put your bets down? What do you think the answer was?
Lu: Hmm.
Tirth: Can humans recognize their own dogs by just smell?
Lu: Wow. Wow. Wow. It’s a good question. Well, first, I want to ask, though, other smells could potentially get on the blanket, right? Like, if you have a lot of perfume in your house…
Tirth: Yes. Beautiful question.
Lu: If you cook a lot of chili, some of that could, you know, get on the blanket.
Tirth: And this is a great question. This is why I love this study. They actually accounted for that as well. They actually did a second experiment in parallel with this, where they gave each participant a second blanket. And they said, hang this up somewhere in your house, out of the reach of the dog. Oh, and after three days, bring that blanket back. And separately, they had the people – they were still given two blankets and they were asked the question – can you recognize your own house just by the smell?
Lu: Okay, so two different tests.
Tirth: Two different tests, yes.
Lu: A very well-controlled study.
Tirth: Yes, because they pointed out – like you said, exactly like you said – it’s possible that the dog smell that’s on the blanket could just be from the environment and that’s what the owners might be picking up. So they wanted to control for that. There’s a term for this, by the way, we call these confounders or confounding factors.
Lu: So they’re getting two blankets, one from their dog, one from a different dog or?
Tirth: Yes, one from a different dog. One from a different dog.
Lu: Okay, got it.
Tirth: And not just that, they try to match up the breeds of dogs as best as they could. So for example, if your dog is a golden retriever, they tried so that the second blanket you got was of a dog that’s either a golden retriever itself or a very similar breed.
Lu: Wow.
Tirth: Yeah.
Lu: Wow. I’m going to say no. I’m going to say they guessed about 50% correct.
Tirth: Okay. So chance. And then what about when they were asked to recognize if-
Lu: For the house, I’m going to say also 50%.
Tirth: Okay. Before I get into that, I just want to make two more points about how well they tried to control this. Because you could raise a question, for example, if the people didn’t do as expected in smelling or recognizing their own dog from the smell, you could say, oh, maybe they haven’t been with the dog for that long, or maybe they’re not the primary caregiver – or not the caregiver, but the primary dog person, right? Well, they controlled for that. The people they selected had all been with their dog for more than a year. They’re all the main dog person. Another possible objection people could raise is that, well, maybe there’s two dogs in the house. What then? They made sure to only select people that had only one dog. They also told their owners, do not groom your dog a month before the experiment so that you wouldn’t get like chemical smells or anything like that in there.
Lu: Okay, so no bath?
Tirth: No bath, nothing.
Lu: Wow. For a month.
Tirth: For a month, before the study.
Lu: Wow.
Tirth: So they went through a decent amount of effort to make sure…
Lu: Very rigorous. Very good scientists.
Tirth: And I think the part of the reason is, like you pointed out, right? The study design is essentially 50-50. So if you want to extract any meaningful information from this, you have to absolutely make sure that everything else is controlled for. Because you’re starting with just random chance of being 50%, right? Well, here are the results, Lu. And this is going to surprise and shock you because you have very little faith in people.
Lu: Very little faith.
Tirth: A whopping 88.5% of dog owners were able to recognize their own dog just by smelling the blanket.
Lu: Wow. On the first guess?
Tirth: On the first guess.
Lu: Wow. Okay. Wow.
Tirth: But on the flip side, only 69% of participants correctly identified their own home by smelling a blanket.
Lu: Well, that’s still pretty high though.
Tirth: I mean, you might think that, right? But remember, this was a binary choice test. So you’re already starting at 50%. So the bar to be like actually correct, like significantly correct over random is a lot higher. And so when they apply their statistical methods to this is actually not significant.
Lu: Okay. Whereas for the dog – for identifying their own dogs, that was significant. It’s much higher.
Tirth: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Lu: 23 out of… How many more people?
Tirth: Yeah, 23 out of 26 people.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: So based on this, their conclusion is that while people can’t even recognize their own home, so the chances of them recognizing their dog smell just by the smell of their home is very unlikely, which must then mean that they’re very good at identifying their own dog by its smell, just like their dog will recognize them based on their smell.
Lu: Now, the other thing I’m curious about is, how intimate do these people get with their dogs? Is this a representative population of the general public? I don’t mean anything dirty. I just mean, you know, are they wrestling with their dog all the time? How representative is this population of the general public?
Tirth: I would argue that the general dog-owning public, which in America, I think 60% of households have a dog. It’s like something crazy like that. I think they all wrestle with their dogs. They hug them. Some of them even kiss them. But – and I just wanted to add a mini follow-up to this. There’s a second study where they basically did a very similar thing with cats.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: And because cats don’t lay down in one place and not as predictable as dogs, they told the owners, take the blanket and rub it over your cat like a number of times so you get the cat smell on it. But alas, only 52% of the participants recognize their own cat. So once again, just like chance.
Lu: I see. Wow. People don’t get close enough to the cats, I guess.
Tirth: Well, their argument is that yeah, cats can like run away, but also cats groom themselves all the time. So they’re cleaning their own…
Lu: So maybe they don’t impart any smell onto the blanket.
Tirth: Yeah. Or that’s strongly. Exactly.
Lu: Very interesting. What’s the take home message here?
Tirth: The take home message here is dogs are still the best people. People might be good dogs, but dogs are the better people, I guess.
Lu: Very good. Okay. Good study. Anything else?
Tirth: No.
What did you learn today?
Lu: All right, that brings us to the end of another episode of Recreational Science. Tirth, what did you learn today?
Tirth: Lu, I learned today that if I were ever to get Parkinson’s disease, I want this $5 million placebo company to make my…
Lu: The best placebo we can find.
Tirth: Yeah. And I also want Martin Shkreli to be involved in the treatment.
Lu: I will make sure you get the best placebo money can buy.
Tirth: Thank you. Thank you. That’s what I expected from you as a good friend. What did you learn today?
Lu: I learned that if you’re a dog and you have an insufferable owner and you want to run away from your home, make sure you don’t leave any scent trails behind.
Tirth: The owner is going to track you down and bring you back. That’s hilarious, man.
Lu: Well, thank you guys for listening to our podcast. We hope you learned something useful today.
Tirth: If you like listening to us, please give us a like, give us a review, tell a friend on whatever platform you listen or watch us.
Lu: Yeah, that’ll be really helpful. All right. See you guys on the next episode.
Tirth: All right. Bye.
