Psychology dominated at last night's
Ig Nobel Awards - the alternative ceremony for research that makes you laugh and then makes you think. (The Digest provides you with links to the psychology-related journal abstracts and pdfs below).
Marc Abrahams, the founder of the awards, told MSNBC's
Cosmic Log: "Psychology has the bizarre quality as an academic field that it's both the hardest and the easiest thing to do. To really explain anything about how people behave is just hard. But to almost explain it in a way that's probably wrong - that's easy."
The awards are broken down into various categories with only the "cognitive science" prize explicitly aimed at psychological research. However, winners in several categories were clearly psychology-related:
Nutrition prize: Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and British psychologist Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for
electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
Medicine prize: Dan Ariely of Duke University, USA, for demonstrating that
high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.
Cognitive science prize: Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, and colleagues for
discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.
Economics prize: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a
professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings (link is to full-text PDF via author's website).
Literature prize: David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study "
You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."
If any Digest readers locate freely-available full-text pdfs of any of these articles online, please let me know the link(s) via comments, and I'll add them to this post.
Link to Ig Nobel Awards.
译文:
搞笑诺贝尔奖，心理学成主导
在昨晚颁出的搞笑诺贝尔奖中，心理学成为绝对主导。搞笑诺贝尔奖，是一个平行于诺贝尔奖的另类学术奖，它能使你发笑，同时亦可引发你的思考。（本文下方提供相关心理学文摘链接以及pdf格式）
搞笑诺贝尔奖的创始人Marc Abrahams告诉MSNBC宇宙频道：“心理学作为学术领域之一有着其独特的神奇魔力，它既通俗易懂，又艰深莫测。就如同把人如何行为解释得清楚明白总是很难，而解释如何出错却十分容易。”
奖项划分为若干大类，其中只有“认知科学”奖明确指向心理学研究方向。然而，获奖者中却有好几类其它领域的研究明显地涉及到心理学：
营养学奖获得者：意大利特兰托大学的Massimiliano Zampini以及来自英国牛津大学的心理学家Charles Spence通过电子化的方法改变了嚼薯片所发出的声音，使吃薯片的人获得比薯片本身更为新鲜松脆的口感。
医学奖获得者：美国杜克大学的Dan Ariely证明：高价伪劣药品比之廉价假药药效更佳。
认知科学奖获得者：日本北海道大学的Toshiyuki Nakagaki及其同人发现：粘菌可以解决心理困惑。
经济奖获得者：美国新墨西哥大学的Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, Brent Jorden发现：脱衣舞娘的排卵周期对她们赚取多少小费有所影响。
文学奖获得者：英国伦敦卡斯商学院的David Sims的得意之作《你个杂种——一部探究集体内部愤怒的叙事体研究报告》
任何读者在网上找到贴中相关文章的PDF全文，并且是可免费取得的，请通过评论告诉我链接地址，我会把地址添加到本贴中。