Napkins

Thanks to one of my colleagues at the OU for telling the story of ‘What the Bagel Man Saw’ as part of our day school session. This is a great story by Steven Dubner and Steven Levitt and a useful study that is probably sufficiently empirical to use in A2 Psychology. It’s particularly pertinent to Crime (OCR module 2549) and The Environment (OCR module 2547).

In short, Paul Feldman, economist turned bagel man delivered bagels to offices of varying sizes over a number of years and collected payment for the bagels via an honesty box. He kept rigorous data and, being an economist, analysed the data for relationships and correlations.

The data reveals some interesting ‘facts’, not least of all that people are essentially honest (89% of the time on average). There are also some fluctuations in honesty rate related the state of the economy, the weather, ‘911′, the individual’s status in the company, the size of the company etc., all of which offer the opportunity for comparisons to other research that we cover as part of the A2 course. This is of course a godsend for those synoptic questions and provides some much needed insight into ‘white collar crime’.

The story is part of the book ‘Freakonomics’ (details below) and I am told it’s a very good read.

A PDF of ‘What the Bagel Man Saw’ is available here:
http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~bmayes/pdf/Bagel%20Man.pdf.

Levitt, S.D. and Dubner, S.J. (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything William Morrow.

The Virgin Mary toast that sold for 28000 USD on eBay

… Or rather what you don’t.

It’s no surprise, given that the brain is designed to seek out familiar things. However, sometimes the ability to see something that isn’t really there is quite intriguing and just a little bit daft.

In the same way as every newly alighted train passenger is the friend you are waiting for, it stands to reason that other things that are important to us will influence our visual perception; like perceiving faces in the clouds for example, only that’s still not weird enough.

The BBC News site has offered a number of articles describing the mysterious appearance of deities in foodstuffs, most recently the Arabic name for God and the name of Mohammed on a piece of beef in Nigeria.

There’s plenty more where that came from, including Jesus on a chapati and the Mother Teresa cinnamon bun that was stolen.

It’s pretty obvious there are psychological reasons behind these apparently mystical events, not that any are mentioned in the articles themselves (links below). This is rather useful if you’re looking for a decent assignment source, as it’s not just Virgin Mary Toast stories which lend themselves to a good psychological bashing.

The key is to have a good read around the various news and newspaper sites and if you find yourself thinking ‘I know exactly why that happened’ then you may well have struck assignment gold.

Don’t forget articles need to be less than two years old - some of those listed below are not.

BBC ‘Holy Food’ Articles:
‘Allah meat’ astounds Nigerians
India marvels at ‘miracle chapati’
Christmas thief steals ‘Nun Bun’
Woman ‘blessed by the holy toast’
Message from Allah ‘in tomato’
Caravan park ‘Christ’ draws the faithful
Tropical fish ‘has Allah marking’