BiologyFeaturedGeekeryScience

Doctor Who Disproves Evolutionary Psychology!

This was a very clever study and a very cute result. In short: in order to test whether the increased attentiveness and distraction associated with phobias was related to an evolutionary advantage of quickly sensing threats, or if it was due to the increased emotional significance of, say, spiders to arachnophobes.

If increased attentiveness was a result of a need to detect threats, then arachnophobes would be distracted by photographs of spiders, but fans of Doctor Who would not be particularly distracted by photographs from Doctor Who. If increased attentiveness was a result of emotional significance, then fans of Doctor Who would be distracted by photos from Doctor Who just like arachnophobes would be distracted by photographs of spiders.

As it turns out, fans of Doctor Who who are not afraid of spiders are distracted by photographs of Doctor Who. The effect is less significant for Whovians than it is for arachnophobes, which could be due to some residual effect of threatening things being also more distracting than enjoyable ones, although the researchers suggest that could also be due to a greater familiarity or easy recognition of spiders as versus scenes from Doctor Who.

I always thought that I was just easily distracted, but it turns out I'm just a fan of... everything?
I always thought that I was just easily distracted, but it turns out I’m just a fan of… everything?

In any case, this was very cute. Read the whole paper!

I especially liked it as an example of how pop culture was used in science — in this case, the fact that it was Doctor Who that people were fans of was mostly irrelevant to the study; the researchers weren’t interested in Doctor Who as such. But they wanted something that a lot of people would have an emotional connection to — and so they chose pop culture. Which made me smile.

Elizabeth Finn

Elizabeth is a geneticist working for a shady government agency and therefore obliged to inform you that all of the views presented in her posts are her own, and not official statements in any capacity. In her free time, she is an aerialist, a dancer, a clothing designer, and an author. You can find her on tumblr at madgeneticist.tumblr.com, on twitter at @lysine_rich, and also on facebook or google+.

Related Articles

One Comment

Leave a Reply

Check Also
Close
Back to top button