The Pole got IgNobel. Congratulations!!!
I quote for Crazy Science:
That night, the 35th IgNobel Award Ceremony was held. Prof. Marcin Zajenkowski from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Warsaw was a laureate in psychology. Along with prof. Gilles Gignak of the University of Western Australia.
What have they done? Well, they conducted a survey that showed that telling people that they were superiorly intelligent increases their narcissism. Or, professionally speaking, "narcissistic greatness."
A survey conducted in a group of 361 people consisted of first performing the IQ test and then being randomly divided into 2 groups. The first received information that they were above average intelligent, the second that their score was below average.
As shortly as these messages were transmitted, researchers checked the level of momentary narcissism.
And yes – as you can imagine. The “falsely praised” felt exceptional and profoundly believed in their wisdom. In turn, “falsely undervalued” lost assurance and a sense of uniqueness.
Interestingly, people who previously displayed narcissistic features were more resistant to negative information. This may propose that narcissism can act as a shield against criticism.
An interesting thesis appears in the survey that frequently unwarranted commendation of children by parents can induce narcissism.
Other IgNoble this year are:
Showing that drinking can make it easier to talk a abroad language
experimentation of striping cows like zebras to reduce flies bites
survey on the formation of lumps in Italian noodle sauce
checking the impact of alcohol on flight and echolocation in bats
study the desire of different species of lizards to consume different types of pizza
determining the consequence of infants to the mother's food that ate garlic
measuring the rate of nail growth for many years.
I will confess that IgNobel alcoholic-language discovered long ago. In student times (45 years ago) I was hitchhiking from Scotland to London. I managed to find a truck driver without a semi that I traveled with for half the night. He was driving at a velocity of over 120 km/h, and all 50 km we stopped to "hef-a-pajnta", i.e. to drink half a liter of beer. The more the guy drank, the faster he drove. Additionally, we replaced all adjectives with the magic word "fucken". There was no language barrier! Only erstwhile in my life I felt like a native speaker. Right then. If I had published my observations, possibly I would have gotten those 45 years ago.
Michał Leszczyński
