Later, I was crossing a street downtown when a van went through the yellow in front of me. It looked to me like the driver had plenty of time to stop—but no doubt he had his own excuse.

It’s a rare driver who doesn’t run through a yellow light on occasion, and in most cases it’s barely even a conscious decision. You have a split second to decide to brake, keep going…or even speed up.

So how do we make that decision?

A transportation engineering graduate student at the University of Cincinnati recently decided to see what he could learn about the factors influencing the decision to run a yellow light.

In cooperation with the Ohio Department of Transportation and with the help of his advisor, Professor Heng Wei, Zhixia Li conducted research in Akron, Cleves and Fairfield, Ohio. The results were set forth in a paper called “Analysis of Drivers’ Stopping Behaviors Associated with the Yellow Phase Dilemma Zone—An Empirical Study in Fairfield, OH,” and were presented at the 2010 American Society of Highway Engineers National Conference held last week in Cincinnati.

Unfortunately the paper itself is not yet online, but a press release about his findings was put out a few days ago.

According to the release, Li found that lane position, type of vehicle, travel speed, speed limit and the timing of the light all figure in the running of yellow lights.

For example, he found that people in the right lane are 1.6 times more likely to speed through a yellow light than drivers in the left lane.

Drivers in heavy trucks are more likely to pass through a yellow light than drivers of automobiles, SUVs, vans or pickup trucks. I suspect that’s a matter of momentum: it takes a heavy vehicle longer to stop than a lighter one, and once it’s stopped, it’s harder to get going again.

I also suspect, though Li’s research has nothing to say on the matter, that in Saskatchewan in the winter time the incidence of people running yellow lights increases dramatically because suddenly all of us are dealing with the problem of momentum: brake too hard on an icy road and you’ll skid through the intersection, possibly out of control. Even if you do manage to stop, you may find it almost impossible to get going again. In effect, winter turns us all into heavy trucks.

(Er, turns our vehicles into heavy trucks. Although, after a month of Christmas goodies…)

Travel speed is a pretty obvious factor: the faster a vehicle is travelling at the onset of the yellow light, the more likely it is to pass through it. And that naturally means that the higher the posted speed limit, the more likely vehicles are to pass through the yellow light at an intersection.

Finally, there’s the timing of the light.

Yellow lights are typically set to last somewhere from three to five seconds. Drivers coming to an intersection with a longer yellow light are more likely to pass through it (presumably because they’re familiar with the intersection and know how long the light is going to be).

In fact, Li found that for every additional second a yellow light persists, drivers are three times more likely to pass through the intersection under yellow. In other words, drivers are three times more likely to pass through a four-second yellow than they are a three-second yellow, and three times more likely than that to pass through a five-second light, which if my math is right means that they’re a whopping nine times more likely to pass through a five-second yellow than a three-second one.

This kind of empirical data should be of great use to traffic engineers attempting to make better, smoother and safer the flow of traffic through cities.

It might even, the press release suggests, “help drivers consider their own actions when in the yellow-light dilemma zone.”

But that, I’ll believe when I see.

Have you ever wondered why?

A German researcher at the University of Bamberg with the unlikely-yet-oddly-appropriate name of Claus-Christian Carbon did, and the results of his study were recently published in the journal Acta Psychologica under the title “The cycle of preference: Long-term dynamics of aesthetic appreciation.”

Carbon suggests that two basic but somewhat conflicting human tendencies influence our reaction to automobile designs: a natural inclination to prefer curved objects, and a fascination with the new.

Normally, humans avoid sharp objects, because sharp objects—fangs, claws, knives, thorns—can hurt us. Rhinoceroses are more alarming than hippos, for example.

Indeed, MRI studies have found that the amygdala, a brain structure activated by fear-inducing stimuli, “lights up” more when sharp-edged objects are in view than when rounded ones are.

But we have another natural inclination, which is to take notice of the new and unexpected. Place a black obelisk like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey in a field full of tulips, and our attention will be drawn to the sharp-edged obelisk rather than the flowers.

The ebb and flow of curviness and sharpness in car design vocabulary (“Formensprache” is the wonderful German word) is a result of these conflicting impulses, Carbon suggests.

For his research, he had four different groups of participants rate car models from 1950 to 1999, but he primed each group a little differently. In the first study, participants, who were asked to rate curvature, complexity, quality, innovation and security, were given no historical context: they didn’t know when the cars were built.

In the second study, historical context was provided, so the viewers knew what era the cars originated from, the goal being to identify what Carbon calls “Zietgeist-dependent” effects. In a third study, before being shown the cars from 1950 to 1999, participants were first shown futuristic concept cars; in the fourth, participants were first shown highly angular historical cars.

In the third study, where the participants were first shown futuristic cars before being shown models from the past 50 years, the “shock of the new” influenced their opinion: they rated cars from the past 15 years as being lower in innovation and also didn’t like them as much as participants who weren’t first shown concept cars. “We experience similar cognitive processes when coming back from influential international motor shows in Frankfurt, Tokyo or Detroit,” Carbon says:  suddenly everyday cars look old-fashioned…no matter what their curvature.

So: our natural preference for curvy cars can be overcome by the novelty factor of sharp-edged cars. But after a few years of boxy cars, curvy ones, which we naturally prefer anyway, begin to look fresh again…and so car designers and buyers move back toward them.  As Carbon puts it, “The evolutionary program (favouring curves) is always running, but on top of it can be running a cultural program,” which favors innovation.

Interestingly, that cultural program seems to be running faster: Carbon says the cycle in car design between curvy to sharp and back again is speeding up. He says that while it used to take 50 years for car designs to swing between rounded and boxy, now it’s more like 20 years: in fact, he predicts an increase in sharply angled cars in the coming decade.

Oddly enough, sharp-edged designs’ association with things that can hurt us may be part of their appeal. The amygdala lights up, warning us, but we know there’s not really anything to fear from a car’s sharp edges: it becomes a safe thrill, like the thrill we get on a rollercoaster.

Ultimately, this explains more about human nature than just how we like our cars to look, of course. As Carbon puts it, “although humans might generally be pre-shaped by evolution to prefer specific properties preventing them from danger, they are specifically shaped to explore innovative and challenging properties.”

And, he adds, the push-and-pull between those conflicting impulses may ultimately explain why humans are both so successful in designing objects, and in adapting to them.

Our moral judgment feels so integral to who we are, so much a part of our personality, that it’s a bit disturbing to discover, as MIT researchers reported this week, that it can be disrupted by magnets.

Rebecca Saxe, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has focused her research on social cognition: how we interpret other people’s thoughts. She wants to understand how the brain gives rise to things like moral judgments, belief systems and language.

The challenge, of course, is that we have no way to observe people’s thoughts and beliefs directly. Nevertheless, we do have tools with which to see which parts of the brain are active when we think about other people’s thoughts, which we do whenever we’re trying to figure out why others are behaving the way they are.

I’ve referred in many previous columns to functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which measures blood flow, and hence activity, in various regions of the brain. Using that tool, Saxe has discovered that an area called the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), is highly active when we think about people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs.

In the new study, Saxe and her fellow researchers used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ: in other words, they applied a strong magnetic field to a small area of the skull. The magnetic field created weak electrical currents that made it hard for nearby brain cells to fire normally. (Fortunately, the effect is temporary.)

They ran two experiments. In one, they exposed the right TPJ of volunteers to TMS for 25 minutes, then had the volunteers take a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments on the actions of the characters in the scenarios, using a scale of one to seven, with one being “absolutely forbidden” and seven being “absolutely permissible.”

In the second, they applied TMS in 500-millisecond bursts just at the moment when the volunteer was asked to make a moral judgment, such as how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she makes it across unharmed.

(That’s a common kind of scenario in morality studies, because people who have the normal capacity to infer other people’s thoughts would typically judge the man as morally wrong because something bad could have happened and he knew it, whereas those without that capacity, such as those with certain kinds of brain damage, judge his action to be morally acceptable because nothing bad actually happened.)

In both experiments, the researchers discovered that, when the right TPJ was subjected to TMS, the subjects were more likely to judge the man’s action as morally permissible. That seems to indicate that when brain activity in the right TPJ is disrupted, people are less able to interpret other’s intentions, leaving them with only the outcome on which to make their judgment.

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour,” says the study’s lead author, Liane Young. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”

That’s not to say that the disruption completely reversed people’s moral judgments, but it definitely biased them. As Saxe points out, there’s more to moral judgment than merely understanding other people’s intentions. We also take into account their desires, previous record and any external constraints, and it’s all guided by our own concepts of loyalty, fairness and integrity.

Moral judgment, Saxe says, even though it feels like one uniform thing, is “actually a hodgepodge of competing and conflicting judgment, all of which get jumbled into what we call moral judgment.”

As the MIT researchers continue their research, I can’t help but think there’s a germ of a science fiction story here, one in which a villain uses technology to disrupt the brain activity of a law-abiding citizen, turning him into a savage, murderous animal. I even have a title: “Animal Magnetism.”

OK, maybe not.



Yet science has carried out relatively little research on boredom. About four years ago, Richard Ralley, a lecturer in psychology at Edge Hill University in England, set out to change that. Ralley believes that boredom must serve a useful purpose, or it wouldn’t have evolved. He suspects it may be a matter of energy conservation: boredom is the brain’s way of telling the body it’s time to rest, that the task it’s engaged in isn’t worth the expenditure of energy.

Some positive aspects of boredom have been identified in previous research, which has shown that business people who take time off to relax during the day perform better than those who spend 12 hours at a time at their desk. It’s also been found that being bored at work can motivate people to develop themselves professionally.

Ralley’s research is ongoing, as far as I can tell. He had the idea to research boredom in 1999, he started his research in 2006, and the last mention I could find of it was from 2008. There haven’t been any results published. Maybe he’s bored with the whole thing.

Still, Ralley’s suggestion that boredom may actually be good for us has gotten some traction. A long column by Carolyn Y. Johnson in the Boston Globe from March 2008 points out that we live in a society where we’ve done everything we can to banish boredom. Find yourself at loose ends for five minutes? You whip out your cell phone and play a quick game, or text somebody. Boredom is so feared that you’re practically forced to watch television everywhere you go, from banks to pubs.

But, writes Johnson, “We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life’s greatest luxuries—one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works.”

She quotes Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Sudbury psychiatrist and author of the book CrazyBusy: “If you think of boredom as the prelude to creativity, and loneliness as the prelude to engagement of the imagination, then they are good things. They are doorways to something better, as opposed to something to be abhorred and eradicated immediately.”

In this view, creativity is the brain’s internal defense against boredom. Like a kid who, in the absence of a toy, amuses herself with by playing with the silverware, bored people have no choice but to busy themselves with their own thoughts.

There’s certainly some truth to that. I’ve plotted more than one novel in my head while driving on Saskatchewan’s highways.

But now comes the disturbing news that bored people die younger than less-bored people. Annie Britton and Martin J. Shipley of University College London followed up on a survey of boredom levels in more than 7,500 civil servants between the ages of 35 and 55, carried out between 1985 and 1988, to determine how many were still alive as of last April.

They found that those who had high levels of boredom in the original survey (about 10 percent reported being bored within the previous month, women, younger workers and people with menial jobs being the most bored) were 37 percent more likely to be dead.

Were they literally bored to death? Probably not: the scientists suspect bored people are more likely to adopt unhealthy habits such as smoking, drugs or drinking.

So it seems boredom can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you deal with it.

Which puts the quest to abolish it into perspective, I suppose. Better you should deal with boredom by playing games on your cell phone than by drinking yourself into an early grave.

Should you be feeling especially bored right about now as this column finally winds down, I hope you’ll keep that in mind.

The fact is, we’re all influenced by the people around us…and we often think of that influence as a bad thing.

As the Bible puts it, “Evil companions corrupt good morals.” And other kinds of companions can have other effects.

For instance, an analysis of 12,067 people that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 revealed that you are more likely to be obese if your best friend is obese. (Overstuffed siblings or spouses also makes a difference, but the greatest negative effect comes from fat friends.)

To a certain extent, it seems, obesity is a kind of societal disease, rather like the mysterious fainting disorders Victorian women seemed to be heir to, or the bizarre disorder koro, which in South China convinces men that their genitals are shrinking inward and they will die once they disappear.

Which they don’t, of course, but the affliction is real even if the symptoms are imagined.

High anxiety, depression, anorexia and bulimia are also contagious, and if you believe all these things are being foisted upon us by a secret government agency, perhaps you have fallen prey to another contagious state of mind, paranoia.

But not all social contagions are bad.

Back around Christmas of 2008 I wrote a column on the discovery that happiness is contagious, spreading rather like influenza. It seemed a particularly fitting column for the holiday season…and the newest research along those lines seems particularly fitting for a post-holiday column, because now comes word that self-control is also contagious.

At the University of Georgia, psychology professor Michelle vanDellen and colleagues were able to measure the effect in the laboratory, through a variety of studies over two years.

In one, they randomly assigned 36 volunteers to think about a friend with either good or bad self-control. They found that those thinking about a friend with good self-control squeezed a handgrip (a standard method of measuring self-control, since you have to force yourself to keep squeezing it as your hand gets more and more tired) longer than those who were asked to think about a friend who had poor self-control.

In a second test, 71 volunteers were again randomly assigned to either watch other people exert self-control by choosing to eat a carrot rather than a cookie when presented with both options, or fail to exert self-control by eating a cookie rather than a carrot. The mere act of watching those acts of good and bad self-control altered the volunteers’ performances on a later test of self-control.

In a third experiment, 42 volunteers were randomly assigned to list friends with both good and bad self-control. Then, as they were working their way through a computerized test designed to measure self-restraint, the computer would flash, for just 10 milliseconds–too fast to be read, but enough to bring the names to mind–the names of those friends. Volunteers who were flashed the name of a self-disciplined friend did better on the test than those who were flashed the name of a non-self-disciplined friend.

VanDellen believes that the influence is great enough that hanging around with friends who exhibit self-control could help us keep from eating an extra high-calorie snack at a party, or drive us to go to the gym for a workout at the end of a hard day at work. It’s only a nudge, but sometimes a nudge is all that’s needed.

And just why are we so susceptible to peer pressure?

Because we’re primates, and, as science writer Meredith F. Small puts it, “A primate’s day is all about everyone else.”

Chimpanzees and other primates spend all their time touching each other, keeping track of each other, and building interpersonal relationships…and in a very real sense, so do we. We are constantly influenced by those around us…and influence them, in turn.

Rather alarming, if you ask me. I think I’ll just sit in my office from now on and not talk to anyone.

I wouldn’t want to catch anything.

It’s easy, when you’re one of the little guys in any creative field, be it fashion, books, movies or music, to envy the runaway successes and wonder what, for example, Stephenie Meyer’s got that you ain’t got. Are her books, objectively, truly so much better than everyone else’s? Or, more to the point, than mine?

Probably not, suggests recent research: in fact, runaway successes are runaway successes in part because they’re runaway successes…and efforts to figure out what “the next big thing” will be are largely wasted, because there’s no way to know.

That’s because people simply don’t make decisions as independently as we like to think.

A recent research project at Columbia University, led by Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik, showed just how big an impact social influence can have on the popularity of something.

Through a website called Music Lab, the two registered more than 14,000 participants for their study. These participants were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of.

Some participants were only shown the names of the songs and bands. Others also saw how many times other participants had already downloaded the songs. Those who could see how often songs were downloaded were further split into eight separate “social-influence worlds”: they could only see the number of downloads a song received from other members of their “world.” This allowed the popularity of songs to evolve independently, eight times over.

If people made their choices completely independently, the scientists predicted, the most successful songs would draw about the same market share among both the participants who saw only band and song names and those who also saw how often the songs had been downloaded. As well, they predicted, the same songs, the “best songs,” would become hits in all eight social-influence worlds.

Instead, the most popular songs were much more popular, and the least popular songs less popular, in the social-influence worlds than in the independent group. Not only that, different songs became hits in each of the separate worlds.

This is where the idea of “cumulative advantage” comes in.  Initially, all the songs were equal. But random choice by the participants soon meant that some songs were downloaded more than others. And once that happened, more participants started downloading them than the other songs, because they thought there must be a reason for their popularity–even though that popularity arose mostly by chance.

It may offer some slight solace to those who cling to their belief that they can’t be swayed by mass opinion that perceived quality did play some role in popularity. When downloads across all eight social-influence worlds were added together, songs the participants rated as higher in quality–“good” songs–had higher market share on average than “bad” ones. But the effect was miniscule. One song squarely in the middle of the quality rankings was number one in one social-influence world and number 40 in another one.

Or, as Watts put it in his New York Times article about his research, “A song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50-percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.”

All of this indicates that things don’t become popular solely because they meet some previously unsuspected public desire or somehow match up with the public’s changing tastes. Instead, things become popular almost by chance, and then their very popularity changes the public’s taste. The market, in other words, influences itself.

Or, as the publisher of Lynne Truss’s bestselling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves put it when asked to explain its success, “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”

I’m not entirely convinced, so I’d like all my readers to help me conduct an experiment. I’d like each of you to go out and buy a dozen–better yet, two dozen–better yet, 100!–copies of my science fiction books Marseguro and Terra Insegura, just to see if we can artificially drive them to the top of the bestseller charts.

I’ll compile the royalties…um, I mean, the results…and report back just as soon as I can.

Well, if Oprah and Cameron will quit pestering me long enough, that is.

But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek them out.

Which raises an interesting question. Do we perceive music differently when we watch it being played than we do when we are only listening to a recording?

Michael Schutz is both a noted percussionist and a noted researcher. Currently an assistant professor at McMaster University, he runs a research lab dedicated to studying the cognitive science of music, and the visual component of music is something he’s very interested in.

As he notes in an article published by the Acoustical Society of America, “while purists may argue that music is an auditory experience and therefore visual information is irrelevant, the enormous investment in clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects in live concerts demonstrates audiences clearly respond to and appreciate visual information as part of the musical experience.”

“Clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects” is rather too broad a collection of items to serve as the focus of a practical experiment, so Schutz decided to look at a much narrower question, i.e., “Do the gestures used by percussionists have any musical value irrespective of their acoustic consequences?”

This has long been a matter of debate. Some percussionists are adamant that using a sharp wrist motion produces a more staccato sound than a fluid motion. Others are adamant that gestures don’t matter: a percussion instrument will make the same sound if struck with the same amount of force no matter what gesture is used to produce the blow.

It turns out that they’re both right–or both wrong, depending on how you look at it–because there’s a difference between sound (acoustics) and the way that sound is experienced (perception).

Schutz and colleagues conducted two experiments. In the first, they recorded a world-renowned percussionist performing notes using long and short gestures on a professional-quality marimba. Participants rated the duration of each note twice: once while viewing the gesture, once just by listening.

The result: notes produced by long and short gestures were indistinguishable when judged by audio alone, but were judged to be significantly different when the accompanying gesture was seen…even though the participants had been specifically instructed to ignore visual information when making their ratings. Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it…alters the way the note sounds.”

Earlier studies had suggested that visual information does not influence ratings of note length, but Schutz suspected his experiment revealed such an influence because of the particularly strong visual connection between the gesture of the marimba player and the sound produced. He predicted the results would only apply to percussive sounds, where the motion producing the sound is clearly visible.

To test that prediction, the researchers paired the original videos with notes produced, not only by the marimba, but by piano, French horn, clarinet and voice. A second set of participants followed the same procedure as before…and found that non-percussive sounds were unaffected by the visuals…not too surprising, since we obviously know that a man hitting a marimba won’t produce the sound of someone singing. (Interestingly, some visual influence was found in the piano…which is technically a percussive instrument.)

All of which seems to indicate that, at least for percussion, there is a very strong link between the sight of a live musician playing an instrument and the listeners’ perception of the sound…and that watching a percussionist play live is a very different experience from listening to a recording.

Percussionists, Schutz suggests, use this “musical illusion” to “align audience perception with performer intent.”

Quite likely, other musicians make use of similar illusions. Pete Townshend’s wind-milling arm may not produce any different sound from an electric guitar than the less flamboyant display of another musician–but that’s not the way we perceive it.

Our brains are so strongly affected by visual stimuli that we literally cannot ignore them…which means that, while recorded music has its uses, it can never replace the impact of hearing, and seeing, music performed live.

Bonus: no silly, uncomfortable earbuds required.

Well, new research offers clues to one of the most baffling aspects of the eternal battle of the bulge: why we keep eating even when we’re full.

Short version: blame your brain.

When you’re hungry, food looks more appealing than when you’re not: hence the old adage about never shopping on an empty stomach.

Previous research has suggested that ghrelin, a hormone the body produces when it’s short of calories, may act on the brain to trigger this behavior. Now new research suggests that this same hormone–increased levels of which have also been linked to the pleasurable feelings people get from alcohol or cocaine–may also come into play to trigger overeating.

Or, as Dr. Jeffrey Zigman, assistant professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern, puts it, “There may be situations where we are driven to seek out and eat very rewarding foods, even if we’re full, for no other reason than our brain tells us to.”

Rewards, in psychiatric terms, are things which make us feel better: they’re pleasurable, they motivate us to work to obtain them, and they even help reorganize our memory so we remember how to get them.

To discover why people who are already stuffed with food nevertheless go ahead and order a massive dessert, Dr. Zigman and colleagues conducted two tests.

First, they evaluated whether fully sated mice preferred a room where they had previously found high-fat food over one that had only offered ordinary bland mouse-chow. They found that when they gave the mice ghrelin, they strongly preferred the high-fat room. Those that were not given ghrelin showed no preference.

That appears to indicate that, thanks to ghrelin, the mice remembered how much they had enjoyed the high-fat food and where to get it. Even though the room was now empty, they still associated it with something rewarding.

Blocking the action of ghrelin reduced the amount of time the mice spent in the high-fat room.

In the second test, the researchers watched to see how long mice would continue to stick their noses into a hole to receive a pellet of high-fat food. The animals that received ghrelin did so far longer than their non-ghrelinated cousins.

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “I am not a mouse. I am a human being!”

Well, sure, but there’s a reason mice are always being used as medical stand-ins for humans in laboratory tests: we have the same type of brain-cell connections, the same type of hormones, and the pleasure centers of our brains are similarly structured.

Does this let you completely off the overeating hook? No, because we are capable of resisting these kinds of urges: we do it all the time, or else we’d never get anything else accomplished. So even though the dessert looks tempting, you don’t have to eat it…but it does take a conscious effort, and sometimes that’s in short supply.

Brian Wansink, a behaviorial scientist at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, has listed a few strategies to avoid giving in to ghrelin’s urges and eating unconsciously.

For one, use smaller plates and serving bowls. The bigger the plate is, the larger the servings tend to be, 25 to 28 percent larger on average.

Also, don’t watch TV while you eat. When your conscious mind is distracted, your unconscious mind takes over. People watching TV typically eat 40 percent more food.

And finally, don’t go back for seconds. People at a buffet who put everything they’re going to eat on their first plate, dessert included, eat 14 percent less than those who put smaller portions on their plate, then go back for more.

I know, I know. For this Christmas, all this information is too little, too late.

But it’s almost New Year’s, a time for regret and resolution.

And if you fall off of the eating-less wagon in a few weeks…well, tell everyone you can’t help it, you have a hormonal condition.

The fault lies in our ghrelin, not ourselves, that we are gluttons.

What’s that? Yes, zombies are big in pop culture right now, but what’s that go to do with…? Oh, I get it.

No, sorry, this column isn’t about zombies. It’s about husbands going shopping with their wives. It turns out there’s a solid scientific explanation for why women shop the way they do…and why men find it baffling.

At least, that’s the claim of Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. According to his study, about to be published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, it all goes back to our evolutionary heritage.

“It’s perfectly natural that men often can’t distinguish a sage sock from a beige sock or that sometimes women can’t tell if the shoe department is due north or west from the escalator,” is how the university’s press release about the study puts it.

“From an evolutionary perspective, it all harkens back to the skills that women used for gathering plant foods and the skills that men used for hunting meat.” the press release continues.

Kruger conducted his study during a winter holiday trip with friends across Europe.  (Nice work if you can get it!)

He says that after exploring sleepy little villages and finally reaching Prague, the first thing the women wanted to do was shop–and the men couldn’t understand why.

It makes sense, though, if you think of it in terms of a gathering strategy, Kruger says. “Anytime you come into a new area you want to scope out the landscape and find out where the food patches are.”

He points out that in hunter-gatherer societies, gathering edible plants and fungi is traditionally done by women. The women return to the same patches of land where they have previously successfully found food, usually staying close to home and using landmarks as guides.

Foraging is a daily activity, often social, he goes on, and can include young children if necessary. The gathering women have to be adept at recognizing the colours, textures and smells that ensure safe, quality food, and must also be able to recognize how long it takes a patch of land to regenerate a quantity of food after it has been harvested.

How does that translate to modern terms? Women, says Kruger, are much more likely than men to know when a specific type of item will go on sale, and spend much more time choosing the perfect fabric, colour and texture. They’re usually willing to take their kids shopping with them.

Men are usually the hunters in hunter-gatherer societies. Once they’ve killed something, it’s important to get meat home as quickly as possible. Taking children along on a hunt isn’t safe and could make success harder to achieve.

Fast-forward to modern times: men usually have a specific item in mind from a store, and want to go in, get it, and get out as quickly as possible, preferably unhindered by having to look after a child at the same time.

Having made that connection, though, Kruger backs away from it a little bit, admitting that of course these behaviors aren’t genetically determined and don’t apply to everyone. Nevertheless, they’re common enough stereotypes that he believes there’s value in considering them as a result of what his paper calls “Evolved foraging psychology.”

“The value is in understanding each other–both your own shopping strategy and the strategy of the complementary sex,” Kruger says. “It helps demystify behaviors–guys, myself included, have been puzzled by why women shop the way they do.”

Similarly, women can have a hard time understanding a man’s aversion to shopping, he says.

As for practical applications beyond mutual understanding–well, Kruger doesn’t mention any, but personally I think the next time I’m asked to go shopping, I’ll demur on the grounds I have to go kill a woolly mammoth for supper.

I’m sure that will be an acceptable excuse. Won’t it, dear?

That simple declarative sentence contains a novel’s worth of angst for fans of the Riders (and possibly for fans the Stampeders, too, but I can’t speak about that, not being one of those LOSERS!…oops, sorry, did I type that out loud?).

Roughrider fans, often said to be the greatest in the country, are passionate about their team. They want them to win. They really, really want them to win. (Please, God, let them win!)

And yet, deep down, they fully expect them to lose.

This, science tells us, is precisely why they enjoy watching the Riders play so much.

A new study from Ohio State University has found that when sports fans watch their favorite  team play, they enjoy the experience most when their excitement is mixed with a strong helping of fear and maybe even a soupcon of near-despair.

The researchers studied fans of two college football teams as they watched the teams’ annual rivalry game on TV. They found that it was the fans of the winning team who felt at some point during the game their team was sure to lose who, in the end, felt the game was the most thrilling and suspenseful.

Or, as Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, co-author of the study and associate professor of communication at Ohio State University, puts it, “You don’t want to be in a great mood during the whole game if you really want to enjoy it…We found that negative emotions play a key role in how much we enjoy sports.”

For the study, which appears in the December issue of the Journal of Communication, the researchers studied 113 college students who were watching the 2006 football game between the Ohio State University Buckeyes and the University of Michigan Wolverines. Ohio State was ranked number one and Michigan number two that year, so added to the classic rivalry was the fact that the winner would go to the national championship game.

At halftime, Ohio State was up 28-14, but with 14 minutes to go in the final quarter, Michigan closed the gap to 35-31. With five minutes to go, Ohio scored, making it 42-31; but with two minutes to go Michigan closed the gap again to 42-37, and then made a two-point conversion to make it 42-39. A field goal would have tied the game, but Michigan needed to recover an onside kick…and failed.

From the researchers’ point of view, it was a perfect game. Not only did their team win, the game was close enough to cause serious doubt in their fans that Ohio State could hold on.

The students participating in the study (from Ohio State, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State) completed questionnaires ahead of time indicating which team they were cheering for and how committed they were to it.

They then watched the game on television, wherever they wanted, and logged onto a website during each of the commercial breaks (24 in all) to answer questions about how likely they felt it was their favored team would win, how suspenseful they found the game, and how positively or negatively they were feeling.

The results: negative emotions made for a more enjoyable game.

“You need the negative emotions of thinking your team might lose to get you in an excited, nervous state,” Knobloch-Westerwick says. “If your team wins, all that negative tension is suddenly converted to positive energy, which will put you in a euphoric state.”

Naturally, participants who were fans of one of the teams found the game more suspenseful than those with no strong allegiance, but the intensity of fan commitment didn’t matter: “super fans” did not find the game any more suspenseful than less committed fans.

So, Rider fans, and Stampeder fans, too, if you really want to enjoy the big game on Sunday, you first need to convince yourself that your team stands a good chance of losing.

Fortunately, as a long-time Rider fan, I think I can safely say this will not be a difficult challenge.

UPDATE: In response to this column, I received the following email:

Dear Edward,

While snowed in at Rogers Pass in early Fall of 1988, I watched my first CFL game on TV as the Roughies took it in the shorts.  I remarked to my wife that the team in green needed some fans.  Journeying on to Vancouver, I went into a sports store and informed the salesman that I wished to purchase one of the green and white caps with the S on it.  “Oh, my gosh,” he replied.  “Why not get a cap of a winning team?”  “Give me the green one,” says I.   Well, guess which team won the Grey Cup the following year.

Of course, I place no special significance on my joining the legions of loyal ‘Rider fans.  But, the initial result was something to behold, eh?

Although we live seven months of the year in Reno, my wife and I own a condo in Canmore, and attend games in Calgary when the Roughies are in town.  Oh, do I ever get a kick out of the Rider Nation fans.  All their quaint, colorful costumes.  And the noise they make.  You would think we’re watching the game at Taylor Field.

Kent Austin did it again in 2007.  I went ballistic.  What a great victory for Saskatchewan and the fans.  Again this year, the road to the Grey Cup goes through Regina.  Go ‘Riders!

And, thanks for the great science columns.

Max Andrew

Reno