Weird Science ponders angry flies and guilty dogs

First thing we do, let’s kill all the geese: On the same week that New York City authorities announced that they planned to do a large bird cull in the area of the city’s two major airports, scientists have discovered that, to an extent, they’ve got the wrong guy. In a study that was just released, researchers tested the isotope ratios found in the feathers sucked into the engines of Flight 1549, which famously landed in the Hudson River, and concluded the geese were migratory. Killing the geese that linger in the neighborhood of the city’s airports may ultimately reduce the risk of future events of this sort, but it’s a bit ironic that it’s being done in response to an event they weren’t responsible for.

Good and bad are contagious: Or, put differently, being close to something good can be appealing. Researchers looked into how people are influenced simply by knowing that an item in a group is likely to contain a happy or unpleasant surprise. When told that one of a set of objects contains a gift certificate and shown two sets, the subjects are likely to pick from the set where the objects are grouped tightly together. In contrast, when told that one of the objects had an invisible defect, they tended to pick from the group where the objects were spaced further apart. This effect has a formal name, contagion theory, and it gets stronger as the percentage of effected items in the group, good or bad, increases.

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