Episode 500: Back where it all began

There is a well-named handmade pasta shop in the Wedgewood neighborhood of Seattle called, simply, La Pasta: “The Pasta.” 

Inside the shop there is another, equally beautiful, sign next to which is hand lettered in chalk “CHI MANGIA BENE VIVE BENE.” This is the Italian philosophy of life summarized in five words: “Who eats well lives well.”

UaKS goes global

 

Once in a blue moon I check the stats for UaKS to see just how irrelevant I am as a blogger. I've been doing this for over ten years now. As of today, the sum total of my "All Time" pageviews is 114,494, or about 915 per month since October of 2015. But every once in a while there's a huge spike in the numbers, for reasons that cannot be explained, as UaKS has certainly never had an episode go viral to my knowledge. As you can see below, this March has been one of those spiky months, with 5.5K pageviews in the last 30 days, with 1,580 views just on March 13 and 14.  

 

 

 

Drumming is fun

Instead of boring you with another review of some psychological study you probably don't care about (even if you should!), here is a fun video I came across. They filmed Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers giving drum lessons to some students after telling them that their regular teacher couldn't make it. I love when one of the kids asks him what it's like playing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Smith gives a long, thoughtful answer before adding that "the chicks and the money is awesome."

 

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A talking-to-strangers tale

For all my trumpeting the work of Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, I was surprised to find that I haven't actually mentioned on UaKS his 2014 study "Mistakenly Seeking Solitude,"[1] which I see and hear cited and discussed all the time. That's the one where Epley and his colleague Juliana Schroeder instructed commuters on Chicago trains and buses to (1) connect with a stranger near them, (2) remain disconnected, or (3) commute as normal. The study participants reported a more positive experience when they connected with their fellow commuters than when they did not. (Leave those earbuds out!) But that was the opposite of what participants had expected to find, when the researchers asked them beforehand how they thought it would go. The authors' conclusion: "Human beings are social animals. Those who misunderstand the consequences of social interactions may not, in at least some contexts, be social enough for their own well-being," that is, they are "undersocial."[2] I've listened to various conversations with Epley where he talks about putting this idea into practice in his own life by constantly chatting up the people he meets everyday (including every psychologist's favorite, the barista).

Odds and ends

You already know about this one, but I can't help myself: the "Viking eruption" will forever have a place on UaKS:

 

The post-holiday baking

 

During the holidays, I looked through the Bon Appétit holiday issue on Libby and they had a really nice-looking selection of cookies ("The Hometown Cookie Collection"). The actual recipes are behind a paywall. But fortunately they printed all of them on the Good Morning America website, where they also have a nice video segment with the magazine's editor displaying all six of the cookies.

 

They honestly all look good (except the peppermint ones), and very different from the usual holiday classics. Two of them stood out to me, though, and I will try the Key Lime Pie Thumbprint Cookies eventually. But after having Mr. Graham's award-winning chocolate sandwich cookies at Christmas, I wanted to try these sandwich cookies first.

 

These are really pretty easy for a sandwich cookie, and you can be done from start to finish in not much more than an hour. The real selling point, though, is the taste, which is so distinct with the Indian flavors, including black tea leaves in the cookies and cardamom and fresh ginger in the filling. Everyone loved these, including our guest tasters Mary Alice and Graham. I'd have to say they're pretty easily a top five cookie for me now. 

Illusory superiority

One of my favorite findings in social science is the mathematically impossible (much higher than 50%) number of people who think they're above average at various things. Social scientists love to coin clever names for phenomena and this one especially. This particular cognitive bias has been called, among other things, illusory superiority, the above-average effect, superiority bias, and, my favorite, the Lake Wobegon effect, after the fictional town in Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

 

A classic study ("Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?") by Ola Svenson, published in 1981, demonstrated illusory superiority among drivers. Svenson found that 77% of Swedish drivers, and an incredible 88% of American drivers, believed themselves to be safer than the median driver. This study was successfully replicated by Lina Koppel and colleagues in 2023 ("We are all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers: Successful replication and extension of Svenson"). The new study found that over 90% of participants (all Americans) believed themselves to be safer than the median driver. Importantly, the participants in the 2023 study were 562 males and 641 females, so this was not just a guys-think-they-are-superior-drivers thing.