Psychological musings of the rich and famous
Paper uncovers early research by students who went on to more prominent careers, from ‘Sully’ Sullenberger to Natalie Portman
The study was almost laughably arcane: air force cadets’ pupils tended to dilate more when they read cartoons they thought were funny than for ones they did not think were funny.
But the real punch line of this 1978 experiment — “Pupillary size as an indicator of preference in humor,” published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills — is what became of one of the authors, listed as Sullenberger, C.B.
Chesley B. Sullenberger III is the retired airline captain who safely landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 and the hero of the new Clint Eastwood-directed movie Sully. By virtue of publishing his small experiment, he is also a member of an unusual club. Call it the you’ll-never-guess-who-wrote-that collection of authors of psychology studies.
In a paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, two psychology trivia buffs selected 78 published psychology papers from unlikely authors, from a 1784 report by Benjamin Franklin and others — on the fantastical claims of the physician Franz Mesmer about animal magnetism and what would become known as hypnotism — through a physicist’s 2013 debunking of a proposed “optimal ratio” of positive to negative emotions.
In between is a gallery of improbable contributors, including politicians on the left and right (U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, former House majority leader Tom DeLay), actors, a Supreme Court chief justice, three pygmy chimpanzees and perhaps the greatest power forward in basketball history.
Their collective findings are uneven, to put it mildly, but that in itself reveals something about psychological research, the paper argues.
“The two of us are psychology trivia nerds and we were just impressed by how widely psychological research had penetrated the wider culture,” Steven Jay Lynn, of Binghamton University, said of himself and his co-author, Scott O. Lilienfeld of Emory University.
Several of the weakest papers were by Nobel laureates in other scientific fields, they found. “Doing psychology well is harder than it looks — that’s certainly one of the takeaways,” Lynn said.
To build their “listicle,” as they call it, Lynn and Lilienfeld scoured their own memories of publications over red wine and Italian food. They ran the names by friends and spouses and measured the level of surprise by the exclamations of “really?” with each author they found.
Some of the authors, like Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Baba Ram Dass, a counterculture writer) and his colleague Timothy Leary, were psychology professors before they became public figures.
Others, like U.S. chief justice Warren E. Burger and former education secretary William Bennett, wrote widely on social issues. Charles Krauthammer, a political columnist, trained in psychiatry at Harvard; his1978 paper on manias associated with physical illness or drugs has been widely cited in medical literature.
Yet most of the papers are like Sullenberger’s in that they provide fleeting glimpses of the authors’ interests at a particular moment in life, often well before they achieved fame in another field.
In her 1898 paper “Cultivated motor automatism; a study of character in its relation to attention,” Harvard student Gertrude Stein tested people’s susceptibility to the Ouija board effect, in which subconscious thoughts direct actions.
Mayim Bialik, who plays a neurobiologist on TV’s The Big Bang Theory, was an author of a 1999 paper on how the brain processes emotional versus linguistic information. She later earned a doctorate in neuroscience.
Academy Award-winning actress Nata-
lie Portman was also drawn to brain science as a psychology student at Harvard, and is listed as an author on a 2002 brain imaging study under her given family name, Hershlag.
Tim Duncan, the recently retired superstar forward for the San Antonio Spurs, contributed to a 1997 chapter, titled “Blowhards, snobs and narcissists: Interpersonal reactions to excessive egotism,” in the academic text Aversive Inter
personal Behaviors. Duncan, an undergraduate basketball star at Wake Forest University at the time, and his three coauthors each wrote a section of the chapter, said Mark Leary, the senior researcher who oversaw and edited the project at Wake Forest. Leary is now at Duke.
“I don’t know if it’s true but, years ago, I had heard that Tim had framed the first page of the chapter and hung it in his house,” Leary said.
Lynn and Lilienfeld rate the papers by Stein, Duncan, Portman and Bialik as scientifically solid, but are less generous when evaluating the contributions of se- nior scientists from other fields, particularly physics and chemistry.
In 1968, the journal Science published a paper by the chemist Linus C. Pauling, who received two Nobel Prizes. The paper argued that certain mental disorders, including schizophrenia, were caused in part by vitamin deficiencies. This theory, called “orthomolecular psychiatry,” has been discredited.
The pair did not attempt to characterize the contributions of three authors listed by the primatologist Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in a 2007 paper: “Wamba, K., Wamba, P., and Wamba, N.”
The Wambas were bonobos, close cousins of chimpanzees and known for being expressive and sexually active.
The paper did note, in passing, that Savage-Rumbaugh’s was not the only scientific article with an animal co-author: the second author of a1975 physics paper was one F.D.C. Willard.
F.D.C. Willard, as many physics trivia collectors know, was the pen name for Chester, a Siamese cat.