Éclat for the smartest girl in the room
Today: the T-shirt experiment showing that people notice far less about you than you think, the Mary Jane shoe that began life as a comic-strip character, an octopus with three hearts, the enzyme that makes onions sting, and why Russian speakers see blue faster — plus a French phrase for the perfect comeback that arrives too late and the case of the softened footprints.
The Big Idea · Psychology
The Embarrassing T-Shirt Test: Why Nobody Is Watching You as Closely as You Think
In a famous experiment, Cornell students were asked to put on a T-shirt with a large picture of Barry Manilow, a singer most teenagers considered deeply uncool, and walk into a room full of their peers. Before going in, they guessed that about half the people in the room would notice the shirt. In reality, only about a quarter did. Psychologists call this the “spotlight effect”: we feel as if we are standing in a bright circle of attention, when most people are busy standing in their own. The reason is simple. You are the main character of your own life, so every detail about you feels enormous to you, but to everyone else you are just one extra in the background of their story. Follow-up studies found that people overestimate how much others notice their mistakes, their bad hair days and even their best moments.
Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 01.02.2000
Why it's cool The next time you stumble in front of the class, remember that the audience is mostly thinking about how they looked when they did it.
Read moreThe Mary Jane Shoe Started Life as a Comic-Strip Girl
The round-toed shoe with a single strap across the foot is named after Mary Jane, a character in the “Buster Brown” comic strip drawn by Richard Outcault in the early 1900s. A shoe company licensed the character, and the name stuck to the style for more than a century. Part of the reason it keeps coming back is its odd double identity: it looks like a schoolgirl’s shoe, so it feels innocent, but in a bold colour or with a chunky sole it reads as a deliberate, slightly ironic choice. Trends often work like this, taking something old and “childish” and wearing it on purpose, which turns it into a statement. To wear it well, let the shoe be the playful part and keep the rest of the outfit simple, like straight trousers or a plain dress.
Fashion history
Onions Make You Cry Thanks to an Enzyme That Scientists Missed for Decades
When you cut an onion, you break open its cells, and enzymes mix with sulfur-containing compounds that were stored apart. For a long time, scientists believed the tear-inducing gas formed on its own. In 2002, a Japanese research team showed that a specific enzyme, now called lachrymatory factor synthase, makes the gas, which is called syn-propanethial-S-oxide. When it drifts into your eyes, nerves register it as an irritant and your tear glands respond, flushing it away.
Tell someone Onions don’t make you cry by accident: it’s an enzyme-powered chemical defence system, and scientists only found the key enzyme in 2002.
An Octopus Has Three Hearts, and One of Them Stops When It Swims
Two of an octopus’s hearts pump blood through the gills, and the third sends it around the rest of the body. Its blood is blue because it carries oxygen with a copper-based molecule called hemocyanin, rather than iron-based haemoglobin like ours. When an octopus swims, the heart that serves the body stops beating. This is thought to be why they prefer crawling along the sea floor: swimming leaves them out of breath.
Tell someone An octopus has three hearts and blue blood, and one heart actually pauses when it swims, so it would rather walk.
Russian Speakers See Two Blues, and Their Brains Notice
Russian has two basic words for blue: “goluboy” for light blue and “siniy” for dark blue, and there is no single everyday word that covers both. In a 2007 study, Russian speakers were faster at telling apart two shades of blue when they fell on opposite sides of that word boundary. English speakers showed no such speed-up. The effect disappeared when people had to repeat a string of numbers in their head, which suggests that language was really helping them in the moment.
Tell someone Your language can make you faster at noticing colours, because Russian speakers literally spot the difference between light and dark blue more quickly.
The Big Five: The Personality Test Scientists Actually Use
Most psychologists who study personality use the Big Five, which measures five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (a tendency to feel stress and worry easily). Unlike quizzes that sort you into one box, it treats each trait as a sliding scale, and most people sit somewhere in the middle. Researchers like it because its results hold up over time and predict real things, such as how people do in school or work.
Fine print These scores describe tendencies, not destiny: personality shifts gradually through life, and online versions of the test are rough and not diagnostic.
l’esprit d’escalier
less-pree dess-kal-YAY · noun phrase
The perfect comeback that only comes to you after the moment has passed. Literally, “staircase wit.”
« Je lui ai trouvé la réplique parfaite, mais seulement en rentrant : c’est vraiment de l’esprit d’escalier. »
I found the perfect reply for him, but only on the way home: it’s a classic case of “staircase wit”.
The phrase is credited to the philosopher Denis Diderot in the 18th century, who described thinking of the right answer only when he was already on the stairs, leaving a dinner party. Use it when you are replaying a conversation in your head, preferably with a smile.
The Case of the Softened Footprints
The golden crown for the school play was in the costume room at 4:15, and Ms. Reyes found it gone at 6:30. Snow began falling at 4:30 and stopped at 5:30. Only one person left through the side door, and the path from it showed a single set of footprints, each with a thin layer of fresh snow inside it, though still clearly visible. No sharp, snow-free prints lay on top of them. Ivy says she left at 4:00 by the front door, and the front camera confirms it. Noor says she was in the library until 6:15, and the librarian agrees. Theo says he left by the side door at 5:45, after the snow had stopped.
Who took the crown?
Reveal the answer
Theo took it. Ivy left before the crown was last seen, and Noor never went outside. If Theo had really left at 5:45, after the snow stopped, his prints would be sharp and empty of snow. The only prints were already dusted with snow, so he walked out with the crown while it was still snowing, earlier than he admitted.
Russian has two basic words for blue, while English has one, which explains why every argument about paint colour ends with “it’s kind of blue-ish.”
An octopus has three hearts, which seems like a lot of hearts to have broken by one unread message.
The spotlight effect says you think everyone saw your mistake. The truth is that they were all busy worrying that you saw theirs.
Say “I’m Excited” Instead of “Calm Down”
When your heart pounds before a presentation, the usual advice is “calm down,” but that is hard, because anxiety and excitement are physically almost the same state: racing pulse, fast breathing, high energy. In a 2014 study by Harvard psychologist Alison Wood Brooks, people who said out loud “I am excited” before singing, giving a speech or doing a maths test did better than those who tried to calm themselves. The idea is that it’s easier to switch your feeling from “threat” to “challenge” than to switch off your body’s alarm. The studies are small, so it’s no magic trick, but it costs nothing to try.
Try it today Before the next thing that makes your stomach flip, say “I’m excited” out loud (or in your head) three times, and notice what it changes.
Spotlight
Wang Zhenyi
Wang Zhenyi was a Chinese astronomer and mathematician born in 1768, who taught herself science at a time when girls were barely educated. To explain lunar eclipses she used a lamp, a table and a mirror as a working model of the Sun, Earth and Moon. She died at just 29, but her writings on astronomy and mathematics are still studied. More →