226Thought: Using What We
Know
Reasoning Rationally
Barriers to Reasoning
Rationally
Measuring Intelligence: The
Psychometric Approach
Dissecting Intelligence: The
Cognitive Approach
The Origins of Intelligence
Animal Minds
Psychology in the News,
Revisited
Taking Psychology With
You: Becoming More
Creative
7
• Peace: SKN, a Russian company, for converting old am-
munition into diamonds (albeit ones so tiny that they’re
measured in nanometers).
• Literature: The U.S. Government General Accountability
Office, for issuing a “report about reports about reports
that recommends the preparation of a report about the
report about reports about reports.”
• Physics: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick War-
ren, and Robin Ball, for calculating the forces that shape
and move hair in a swinging ponytail.Ig Nobel Prize Winners Announced
CAMBRIDGE, MA, September 21, 2012. The twenty-second First
Annual Ig Nobel ceremony took place last night at Harvard
University’s Sanders Theatre, honoring winners of ten Ig Nobel
prizes. The event is sponsored by Improbable Research, an
organization whose stated goal is to honor achievements that
“first make people laugh, then make them think.”
Like the real Nobels, the Ig Nobels are awarded in many
areas, ranging from public health to peace to biology. The
sponsors say that the prizes “are intended to celebrate the
unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people’s interest
in science, medicine, and technology.” This year’s winners
come from Canada, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Peru,
Russia, Rwanda, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the
United States:• Anatomy: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for showing
that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees just by
looking at photographs of their fellow apes’ rear ends.
• Psychology: Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, and Tulio Guada-
lupe, for discovering that when people lean to the left,
they see the Eiffel Tower as being smaller than when they
stand upright.
• Acoustics: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada, for invent-
ing the SpeechJammer, a handheld machine that disrupts
people’s speech by playing their words back to them with
a slight delay.thinKing And
intelligence
Psychology in the news
Three scientists spoof the prize-winning “Eiffel Tower” study at the an-
nual Ig Nobel award ceremony, where scientists get to prove they have a
sense of humor.