Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Reshape your mind
One of society鈥檚 more intractable problems is unnecessary risk-taking behaviour. People do all kinds of silly things, like gambling on horses/prediction markets (delete according to age), or yelling 鈥淚 love Coldplay鈥� in a crowded biker bar.
Surely it would be better if people just didn鈥檛 do these dangerous things. The problem is how to achieve this. Perhaps some sort of public-awareness campaign, perhaps taxes on risky activities and purchases to deter people through price, perhaps a sign on the biker bar door saying 鈥渄o not pick a fight鈥�.
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Or perhaps we could all just put on some shapewear. This is the startling conclusion of a little study in , highlighted to us by news editor Alexandra Thompson while, presumably, giggling like a hyena. The study indicates that wearing shapewear can make us less likely to take risks.
Feedback isn鈥檛 normally one for doing anything so responsible as actually reporting the details of an experiment, but in this case we feel readers will demand it. The authors recruited 44 volunteers, who visited the lab on two consecutive days. On one day, each person was asked to wear compressing shapewear; on the other, they were given a loose garment. They were given tests of their interoception: their ability to perceive the internal state of their body, specifically their heartbeat and their gastrointestinal system.
The volunteers were also given a test of risk-taking called the , presented online. They were shown 32 face-down cards and had to choose how many to turn over, with some giving them positive points and others taking points away. Turning over more cards is riskier than turning over just a few.
It turns out that wearing shapewear was associated with more awareness of one鈥檚 internal body state, and with less risk-taking behaviour in the card task. The idea is that enhanced interoception gives people more opportunity to pick up on subconscious warning signals.
Feedback is honestly immediately sceptical, not least because the drop in risk-taking was apparent only for the 28 women in the study: the authors interpret this as a male-female difference in the response to compressive shapewear, whereas we suspect that shapewear might not really affect risk-taking after all.
But mostly, we can鈥檛 believe that anyone had the idea to do this in the first place. Even if we had somehow inexplicably started researching shapewear, we would never have thought of this in a million years.
Cry me a volcano
Recently, Feedback asked the big questions: are some people more prone to crying when chopping onions than others? Do people who are more sensitive to onions also have a stronger sense of smell? We reported a preliminary study with some early results.
Not that we would ever claim we are doing scientists鈥� work for them or anything, but based on our mailbox, this is an untapped gold mine of potential findings.
Let鈥檚 start with the idea that a better sense of smell might make you more prone to crying over onions, something the study we looked at did not support. Jackie Jones adds further disconfirming evidence. 鈥淚 lost my sense of smell six years ago following treatment for cancer,鈥� she writes. 鈥淥nions, all my life, always made my eyes hurt and run, and they still do with absolutely no sense of smell.鈥�
Likewise, Christine Wolak is surprised 鈥渢hat there is any scientific uncertainty about whether different people are affected differently when chopping onions鈥�. She reports that at family gatherings, if she starts chopping onions, it can make her eyes water so badly that someone else has to take over 鈥� inevitably 鈥渆xperiencing no effect at all鈥�. In fact, her eyes are so sensitive to sulphurous chemicals that a hiking trip to the vicinity of the eruption of Kilauea was enough to bring her to tears. 鈥淧eople thought I was so incredibly moved by the experience,鈥� she writes.
Christine offers an intriguing detail: 鈥淭his has not always happened to me.鈥� Only after she had laser eye surgery did onion-induced tears become a regular occurrence. 鈥淚 would love to know if these are related.鈥� On a similar note, Guy Cox reports that his late wife was, at first, unaffected by onions, until she had to swap her contact lenses for bifocal glasses and became thoroughly affected. Might contact lenses be protective?
If you don鈥檛 have easy access to contact lenses, readers Chris Evans and Jackie Jones, as well as the , all recommend storing your onions in the fridge, at least for a little while before chopping, because cold onions don鈥檛 give off the relevant volatile chemicals. Feedback is going to try that and report back.
Different strokes
It鈥檚 been a long time since we saw anything relating to the Scunthorpe problem: the fact that innocuous words can contain objectionable letter strings that may confuse moderation systems. However, a new medium for such rudenesses has come to our attention: those little boxes on social media that recommend accounts to follow.
The estimable folks at the , a British charity, found themselves recommended in the 鈥淪uggested for you鈥� box on Meta鈥檚 Threads. Owing to the small size of the box, however, their name was stripped of the concluding 鈥渙ciation鈥�, with unfortunate results.
The Stroke Association subsequently : 鈥淛ust to reiterate: we talk about medical events, not鈥� whatever this is.鈥�
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