Science Confirms the Obvious!

7. Smoking Cigarettes Costs You Money

The Study: "The wealth effects of smoking," Tobacco Control, Dec. 2004

The Findings: One night during a conference, Ohio State University social scientist Jay Zagorsky and his fellow researchers were smoking, eating, and drinking beer: a moment ripe for inquiry. What effect, they wondered, might those very cigarettes be having on their wallets? Zagorsky crunched data culled from the U.S. Department of Labor's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which tracked financial information and other lifestyle characteristics of 10,000 Americans over 15 years. Holding demographic factors constant, Zagorsky calculated that heavy smokers in the sample had a net worth of $8,400 less than nonsmokers-an amount roughly equal to how much the smokers had spent on their habit.

Why Bother? "When my mother reads this paper, it seems brilliantly obvious," Zagorsky says. "Not so to me." He suggests that smoking-cessation programs could use the data to raise awareness that smoking not only taxes health but hard-earned savings for critical things like retirement, emergencies and, of course, medical bills.

by Young-Min Yoon:  Young-Min Yoon

8. Memory and Concentration Fade With Age

The Study: "Divided attention in younger and older adults," Journal of Experimental Psychology, May 2005

The Findings: Memory researchers have known for years that when your attention is split between two tasks, it's more challenging to commit new facts to memory. Moshe Naveh-Benjamin of the University of Missouri-Columbia was curious how older adults' memories fare when they juggle two things at once. He and his colleagues paired off 20-year-olds with 70-year-olds and asked each team to perform memory tests while playing a simple computer game. Overall, the older folks' memories were less accurate than those of the younger folks'. The older people also performed substantially worse on the game than on the memory test, whereas the younger people had much less trouble multitasking.

Why Bother? The work could promote sensitivity toward the capabilities of older adults. "When you talk to an older person who is driving, don't ask them to recall too much information," Naveh-Benjamin says. "The quality of their driving might deteriorate."

9. Women Like Funny Men

The Study: "The influence of humor on desirability," Evolution and Human Behavior, Jan. 2006

The Findings: Psychologists Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine enlisted 210 undergraduate psychology students at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, to consider, for class credit, photographs of campus peers. Each photo was paired with a remark that was ostensibly funny ("My high school was so rough, we had our own coroner") or ostensibly dull ("I like having friends over for dinner"). Women found the "funny" men most desirable, and a follow-up study showed that men preferred women who were receptive to their jokes.

Why Bother? The scientists acknowledged in their paper the well-established observation that "humor is . . . more readily appreciated in the presence of others" but wondered why it is that women prefer funny guys. Could the phenomenon be a matter of Darwinian survival? The lead scientist declined an interview, but the paper suggests that studies like it further our understanding of evolution by pinpointing which human traits might confer survival advantages. One theory is that men may "produce humor more" to help "monopolize the reproductive potential of more than one woman," a.k.a. to spread their genes.

by Young-Min Yoon:  Young-Min Yoon

10.
Time Flies When You're Busy

The Study: "Time estimation: the effect of cortically mediated attention," Brain and Cognition, July 2004

The Findings: Anthony Chaston and Alan Kingstone, two Canadian psychologists, proved, finally, that time really does seem to speed up when you're busy. The researchers recruited 23 study participants to play multiple levels of a "Where's Waldo?" style computer game. Then they asked the players to estimate how much time had passed after they were finished. The results: The harder the game, the shorter the time estimates.

Why Bother? As far as Chaston was concerned, the axiom was still an open question. He says his team's experiments to measure attention are the most rigorous to date: "Establishing anecdotal evidence as fact means other scientists can use the work as a reference point."