Don’t like your boss? Don’t attack (or eat) him

... and avoid the self-colonoscopy (although you can do it!)

BOSTON — Anyone who’s ever been so furious with their boss that they feel like exacting revenge really needs to listen to Lindie Liang.

Liang and her colleagues found that abusing a virtual voodoo doll instead of your boss will make you feel better without getting you fired or thrown in jail, a study that earned them a 2018 Ig Nobel, the annual prize sponsored by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research for comical but practical scientific discovery.

Winners recognized this week included a Japanese doctor who devised a revolutionary new way to give yourself a colonoscopy and a British archeology lecturer who figured out that eating human flesh isn’t very nutritious.

The prizes at the 28th annual ceremony at Harvard University were being handed out by real Nobel laureates.

The winners, who as usual journeyed to Massachusetts at their own expense, also received a cash prize of 10 trillion virtually worthless Zimbabwean dollars.

Liang, an assistant professor of business at Wilfrid Laurier University, specializes in studying workplace aggression. “We wanted to understand why subordinates retaliate when it’s bad for them,” she said. “We all know yelling at our boss is bad for your career. So what’s the function of retaliation? Why do people keep doing it?”

Obviously, Liang couldn’t ask people to beat their bosses. Instead, they were shown an online voodoo doll with their supervisor’s initials. They then had the option to use pins, pliers or fire on the virtual doll. The bottom line: People felt better after abusing the doll, or as Liang put it, “their injustice perceptions are deactivated.”

James Cole, a lecturer in archeology at Britain’s University of Brighton, earned his Ig Nobel for a study on cannibalism that found that if you want a high-calorie meal, eating human flesh probably isn’t the way to go.

Cannibalism is pretty common throughout human history, he said. Cole found that the caloric value of humans isn’t that high when compared to other animals we know our ancestors hunted and ate. “We’re not super nutritious,” he said. Dr. Akira Horiuchi, a pediatrician at Showa Inan General Hospital in Komagane, Japan, won for his self-colonoscopy study in which he used a colonoscope designed for children and sat upright rather than lying in the traditional supine position.

Horiuchi isn’t recommending that you give yourself a colonoscopy in the comfort of your home. He just wanted to show how easy it can be.

“If people watch a video of my self-colonoscopy, they think colonoscopy is simple and easy,” he said.