25 interesting facts

1. Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients (Schoenfeld and Ioannidis 2013)

2. People in non-English speaking countries with subtitled TV are better at English than people in countries with dubbed television (Micola et al. 2019)

3. Walking speed is a function of city size in that pedestrians move more quickly in big cities than in small towns (Walmsley and Lewis 1989)

4. Littered cigarette filters reduce growth and alter short-term primary productivity of terrestrial plants (Green et al. 2019)

5. Presence of moral-emotional language in political messages increases their spread within ideological groups (Brady et al. 2017)

6. Credit card payments increase unhealthy food purchases (Thomas et al. 2011)

7. Autocracies systematically build more new skyscrapers than democracies (Gjerløw and Knutsen 2019)

8. Bacteria persist more efficiently on laminated restaurant menus as compared to paper menus (Sirsat et al. 2013)

9. People view their own perceptions and beliefs as objective reflections of reality but others’ as distorted by bias (Pronin 2008)

10. The price of champagne falls before New Year’s Eve due to the entry of a large share of new consumers (Bayot and Caminade 2014)

11. In prison, inmates cooperate in Prisoner’s Dilemma (Khadjavi and Lange 2013)

12. The World Cup in soccer increases state aggression (Bertoli 2017)

13. Vaccines are not associated with autism (Taylor et al. 2014)

14. Open office spaces make workers rely more on email while decreasing face-to-face interaction (Bernstein and Turban 2018)

15. GDP data can be systematically manipulated for political ends (Wallace 2016)

16. In used-car transactions, there is left-digit bias in the processing of odometer values, i.e. people focus on the number’s leftmost digits, with implications for the sale price (Lacetera et al. 2012)

17. Thanksgiving dinners attended by residents from opposing political party precincts are 30 to 50 minutes shorter than same-party dinners (Chen and Rohla 2018) (see Frimer and Skitka 2018; 2020)

18. Bronze medalists tend to be happier than silver medalists (Medvec et al. 1995)

19. Warming oceans are killing coral reefs (Hughes et al. 2018)

20. National trust levels are negatively associated with the length of countries’ constitutions (Bjørnskov and Voigt 2014)

21. In an experiment, increased sexual frequency did not lead to increased happiness (Loewenstein et al. 2015)

22. WTO membership is likely to have no causal effect on domestic corruption overall (if anything, it is likely to increase corrupt practices, particularly among firms that are government owned) (Choudhury 2019)

23. Walking is good for creative thinking (Oppezzo and Schwartz 2014)

24. Media outlets are more likely to report opinion polls that show larger changes (Larsen and Fazekas 2019; Searles et al. 2016)

25. Listening to Mozart does not improve your spatial-reasoning performance (Steele et al. 1999; McKelvie and Low 2002; Črnčec et al. 2006)