Have you ever wondered why the least talented are the most successful? A group of scientists have mathematically proven it and got IG Nobel 2022 Toward the most absurd in economics.
In its twenty-third edition, the editors of Annals of Unlikely ResearchIt is a scholarly humor magazine that rewards the most profligate papers with hilarious titles and descriptions published in the world’s most prestigious academic departments.
Can less talent succeed more?
The study that attracted the most attention among the winners was the study of economics.
This award was marked by a study that attempted to explain, mathematically, why success is often not for the most talented, but for the luckiest.
The theory was published in Advances in complex systems.
“Talent is essential to success, but it is not sufficient. You also have to be lucky, and be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the opportunity that arises by chance,” says lead author, Alessandro Plochino.
Interestingly, this award for extravagant study is the second in the career of this researcher from the University of Catania in Italy, where in 2010 they received the same award for mathematically proving that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted random people.
All winners of the IG Nobel Prize 2022
But the rest of the awards are ridiculous in every field of study.
One study, in the Applied Cardiology category, featured research and finding evidence that when a new romantic partner first meets and is attracted to each other, their heart rhythms sync up. Posted in The nature of human behavior.
The Literature Prize was awarded to researchers who have looked at what makes understanding legal documents unnecessarily difficult, a research paper published in the journal knowledge.
The distinction in biology was related to a research paper focused on studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions, published in integrative zoology.
The medicine award went to research aimed at showing that when patients undergo some form of toxic chemotherapy, they experience fewer adverse side effects when ice cream replaces a traditional ingredient of the procedure. Posted in Scientific Reports.
There was also an engineering prize for a study that attempted to discover the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob. Posted in Bulletin of the Japanese Society of Design Sciences.
Art history distinction went to the study entitled “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Enema Scenes in Ancient Mayan Pottery” published in Journal of Ethnopharmacology.
The physics prize went to a group of scientists for trying to understand how ducklings manage to swim in the formation, which was published in Fluid Mechanics Journal.
The Peace Prize was for developing an algorithm to help gossip decide when to tell the truth and when to lie, a paper appeared on Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Finally, the Safety Engineering Award was awarded to a scientist who developed a specific Moose crash test dummy, published by Swedish National Institute for Road and Transport Research. (With information from Europe Press)
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