In 2015, Nick Brown was skimming Twitter when something caught his eye. A tweet mentioned an article by Nicolas Guéguen, a French psychologist with a penchant for publishing titillating findings about human behavior, for example that women with large breasts get more invitations to dance at nightclubs, or blond waitresses get bigger tips. Now, Guéguen was reporting that men are less likely to assist women who tie up their hair.
Brown, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, sent an email about the study to James Heathers, a postdoc in behavioral science at Northeastern University in Boston whom he had met a few years earlier. The description alone triggered a laughing spell in Heathers—not an uncommon reaction to science he finds risible.
Once the chuckling stopped, Brown and Heathers took a deeper look at the findings reported by Guéguen, who works at the University of Southern Brittany in Vannes, France. Many failed the duo’s homegrown test for statistical rigor. The pair also found odd data in nine other articles from Guéguen.
