What Do Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Warren and Tim Duncan Have in Common?

The New York Times:

The study was almost laughably arcane: Air Force cadets’ pupils tended to dilate more when they read cartoons they thought were funny than for ones they didn’t think were funny.

But the real punch line of this 1978 experiment — “Pupillary size as an indicator of preference in humor,” published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills — is what became of one of the authors, listed as Sullenberger, C. B.

Chesley B. Sullenberger III is the retired airline captain who safely landedUS Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 and the hero of the new Clint Eastwood-directed movie “Sully.” By virtue of publishing his small experiment, he is also a member of an unusual club. Call it the you’ll-never-guess-who-wrote-that collection of authors of psychology studies.

In a paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, two psychology trivia buffs selected 78 published psychology papers from unlikely authors, from a 1784 report by Benjamin Franklin and others — on the fantastical claims of the physician Franz Mesmer about animal magnetism and what would become known as hypnotism — through a physicist’s 2013 debunking of a proposed “optimal ratio” of positive to negative emotions. In between is a gallery of improbable contributors, including politicians on the left and right (Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tom DeLay), actors, a Supreme Court chief justice, three pygmy chimpanzees, and perhaps the greatest power forward in basketball history.

Read the whole story: The New York Times