Enlarge / Harvard's got a lawsuit on its hands. (credit: Glowimages)

Accusations of research misconduct often trigger extensive investigations, typically performed by the institution where the misconduct allegedly took place. These investigations are internal employment matters, and false accusations have the potential to wreck someone's career needlessly. As a result, most of these investigations are kept completely confidential, even after their completion.

But all the details of a misconduct investigation performed by Harvard University became public this week through an unusual route. The professor accused of misconduct, Francesca Gino, had filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, targeting both Harvard and a team of external researchers who had accused her of misconduct. Harvard submitted its investigator's report as part of its attempt to have part of the suit dismissed, and the judge overseeing the case made it public.

We covered one of the studies at issue at the time of its publication. It has since been retracted, and we'll be updating our original coverage accordingly.

Enlarge / Why wouldn't you trust this little guy? He's so cute! (credit: Thamrongpat Theerathammakorn)

Making mistakes is human, but it's not limited to humans. Robots can also glitch. As we fast-forward into a future with upgraded AI technology making its way into the classroom (and beyond), are kids willing to trust information from a robot, or would they prefer it to come from a human?

That's the question researchers Li Xiaquian and Yow Wei Quin of Singapore University of Technology and Design wanted to answer. To see whether human or machine was more reliable, they ran an experiment with kids ages 3–5, giving them a screen that paired each of them with an accurate human, an inaccurate human, an accurate robot, or an inaccurate robot.

It turned out that both younger and older children trusted an accurate human or robot equally. However, younger kids given information by an inaccurate human or robot were more likely to trust the human—but why?

Enlarge / Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. (credit: Basic Books)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.

It's one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, "Gorillas in Our Midst"—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.  Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.

What draws us to choose romantic partners? A sweeping new meta-analysis suggests we gravitate toward certain shared traits. (credit: Muramasa)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: a broad meta-analysis spanning over a century of studies finds that opposites don't really attract when it comes to choosing a mate.

We've all heard the common folk wisdom that when it comes to forming romantic partnerships, opposites attract. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, contend that this proverbial wisdom is largely false, based on the findings of their sweeping September study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. The saying, "birds of a feather flock together," is a more apt summation of how we choose our partners.

“These findings suggest that even in situations where we feel like we have a choice about our relationships, there may be mechanisms happening behind the scenes of which we aren't fully aware,” said co-author Tanya Horwitz, a psychology and neuroscience graduate student at UCB. “We’re hoping people can use this data to do their own analyses and learn more about how and why people end up in the relationships they do.”

Enlarge / Shake, shake, shake: this adorable young child would love to guess what he's getting for Christmas this year. (credit: Johns Hopkins University)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: New research shows it’s incredibly easy for people watching others shake boxes to tell what they’re up to.

Christmas Day is a time for opening presents and finally ending the suspense of what one is receiving this year, but chances are some of us may have already guessed what's under the wrapping—perhaps by strategically shaking the boxes for clues about its contents. According to a November paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, if someone happened to see you shaking a wrapped gift, they would be able to tell from those motions what you were trying to learn by doing so.

“There are few things more delightful than seeing a child’s eyes light up as they pick up a present and wonder what might be inside,” said co-author Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University, who studies how vision and thought interact. “What our work shows is that your mind is able to track the information they are seeking. Just as they might be able to tell what’s inside the box by shaking it around, you can tell what they are trying to figure out when they shake it.” Christmas presents are "the perfect real-life example of our experiment.”

Cats have a well-deserved reputation for being independent-minded and aloof, preferring to interact with humans on their own quirky terms. So you'd never see a cat playing fetch like a dog, right? Wrong. That sort of play behavior is more common than you might think—one of our cats was an avid fetcher in her younger years, although she's slowed down a bit with age. However, the evidence to date for specific fetching behaviors in cats is largely anecdotal.

That's why a team of British scientists set out to study this unusual feline play behavior more extensively, reporting their findings in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The researchers concluded that most cats who like to play fetch learned how to do so without any explicit training and that cats are generally in control when playing fetch with their humans. Specifically, cats will play fetch longer and retrieve the thrown object more times when they initiate the game rather than their owners. In other words, cats are still gonna be cats.

Many different animal species exhibit play behavior, according to the authors, and it's most common in mammals and birds. When cats play, their behavior tends to resemble hunting behavior commonly seen in European wildcats and lynxes: rapid approach and retreat, leaping, chasing, pouncing, and stalking. Initially, as kittens, they engage in more social forms of play with their littermates like wrestling, and they tend to engage in more solitary play as adults—the opposite of dogs, who usually start playing with objects alone before transitioning to social play.

Enlarge (credit: University of Arizona)

The hugely popular British quiz show Mastermind has been a fixture on BBC television since its debut in 1972, spawning multiple international versions as well as a video game and countless parodies. Now it has inspired researchers at the University of Arizona, Tucson, to use several recent seasons as a "real-world" lab to study physiological responses to stress, according to a new paper published in the journal Psychophysiology. The findings reaffirmed some prior conclusions of lab-based studies and contradicted others. The Arizona team also found that random variations in the time the host takes to ask different questions means that Mastermind is not perfectly "fair" when it comes to determining the winner.

Why a game show? According to the authors, it's because lab-based experiments in psychology have inherent limitations, in that it is simply too difficult to accurately reproduce complex human cognition in such a controlled setting—particularly when studying things like stress and cognition. "The stakes are too low, the tasks too simple, participants are often bored, and the equipment, such as MRI scanners, too cumbersome, making lab-based experiments a poor reflection of real-world cognition," the authors wrote.

A seminal 1927 study by Eric Ponder and W.P. Kennedy on whether blinking increases when people are under stress is an illustrative case. Ponder and Kennedy initially tried to prove this connection in a lab-based setting with participants hooked up to clunky, uncomfortable devices to measure blink frequency. But they only succeeded in generating the appropriate degree of stress in the test subjects once, when a frustrated participant became genuinely angry. They turned instead to surreptitiously measuring the blink frequency of witnesses under hostile cross-examination in a courtroom. That did the trick, confirming Ponder and Kennedy's hypothesis that blinking does indeed increase in stressful situations.