What Makes Yawning Contagious – It took scientists six months to train Alexandra the red-footed tortoise, but by mid-summer 2009 she finally learned to fake yawning. A formal experiment took place immediately afterwards. Once a day for several weeks, the research team placed Alexandra at one end of a small tank and another turtle—either Moses, Aldous, Wilhelmina, Quinn, Esme, or Molly—directly across from her. They then told her to throw her head back and drop her jaw, as she had been taught, while they watched the other turtle. Would Moses drop his jaw? Or Aldous or Wilhemina? Was there any indication at all that Alexandra’s turtle yawn might be contagious?
It wasn’t there. The research team tried again, this time Alexandra yawned not just once, but two or three times; however, the observer turtles did not respond. The scientists then had Moses and the others watch a video of Alexandra in the middle of a natural yawn instead of the fake one she had been practicing for months. Again, the yawn was not contagious.
What Makes Yawning Contagious
“It is possible that an actual yawn is required to stimulate the observer’s turtle,” concluded the authors in a 2011 paper published in 2011.
Yawns More Contagious Among Friends
. But “our findings are more consistent with the suggestion that turtles don’t yawn in a sticky way.”
This finding, or lack thereof, may seem trite on its surface. But given what we know about the replication crisis in science, the turtle paper could be a sign of things to come. Is it possible that the entire body of sticky yawn research—a small but vibrant field dating back 30 years—is based on shaky premises?
In the 1980s, when contagious yawning was first studied in the lab, scientists speculated that the effect would be unique to humans. It’s not that yawning is all that unusual; Indeed, this behavior has been observed not only in mammals but also in birds, reptiles and amphibians. Rather, the infectious yawn produced in response to someone else seemed a special, social adaptation—perhaps a protoform of empathy—if not an indicator of higher consciousness. “Although the analysis of yawning is in its infancy,” psychologist Robert Provine, the grandfather of contagious yawning research, wrote in 1989, “its future looks bright.”
Provine was the first to show in the 1980s that a person is more likely to yawn in response to videotaped yawns than to videotaped smiles. But the field didn’t take off until 2003, when Steven Platek, a researcher at Gordon Gallup’s lab at the State University of New York at Albany, offered evidence that contagious yawning might be related to “theory of mind,” the human ability to imagine someone. another’s opinion. After Platek, a series of published papers showed that both children with autism and adults with psychopathic tendencies were less inclined than others to catch a yawn from someone else. Meanwhile, another body of research found evidence for contagious yawning, and thus possibly a form of social consciousness, in chimpanzees, domesticated dogs, parrots, rats, and perhaps wolves and monkeys.
Why Yawning Is Catching
It hasn’t been that long since Provine proved that yawns can go viral. But since then, the study of contagious yawning has advanced so much and spread so far into the adjacent fields of neuroscience, ethology, and evolutionary psychology that what once seemed utterly impossible—yawn contagion in a turtle—now deserves a formal examination of lab. It’s even worth posting a score of zero, as if we might be shocked to discover that the turtle is yawning
That’s why the latest study published last week on stickiness is so exciting. In a new article titled “Is Yawning Really Contagious? A Critique and Quantification of Yawning Contagion,” lead author Rohan Kapitany, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, argues that research on the topic suffers from many methodological problems, and that these problems are so significant that they have almost certainly led to the mischaracterization of spontaneous, naturally occurring yawning. as “sticky”. “The observation that yawning is contagious may have arisen from our tendency to see patterns and causation where there are none, to misinterpret the jerkiness of chance as something else,” he argues.
— can also apply to humans. “It remains entirely possible that the contagious yawning phenomenon observed since ancient times is illusory,” he states in the paper. “By using low-quality data in our theory, we may have done no more than see faces in clouds or read tea leaves.”
This is no small claim. If Kapitan is right, then we should be dealing with three decades worth of flawed research. This would mean that all these sticky yawn studies that go back to Provin have been peddling false positives, conflating mere coincidence or mimicry of a non-specific behavioral reflex, and attributing to this absent reflex a deep connection to the social mind.
The Most Contagious Non Disease: Yawning
Wrong. That yawning can spread from person to person isn’t some flashy theory concocted by psychologists in the 1980s, but a common intuition that’s been around for thousands of years. “Why do men usually yawn themselves when they see others yawning?” asks
, an ancient text attributed to Aristotle. Even then, the question was formulated as if the fact of the phenomenon was self-evident. The idea spread and reappeared in Western literature and science over the centuries. In the mid-1500s, François Rabelais described a character whose yawning was so extensive that “he caused his fellows to yawn also out of mutual sympathy”. Less than a century later, Francis Bacon observed that “yawning and stretching pass from man to man…so that if another is able and willing to do the like, he follows, seeing another”. There are many references in periodicals, in old cartoons such as this “The Infectious Yawn” published
Also, just because a belief is widely held or has been around for generations does not make it true. Aristotle
, for example, follows up his question about sticky yawns with another that now seems a little dated: “Why do men get the urge to pee when they’re standing by a fire?” it asks.
Why Yawning Is So Contagious And How It Could Help Treat Diseases
Some of our most persistent and unshakable beliefs stem from fundamental misconceptions and distortions in our judgment. Take, for example, the belief that you can sense when you are being watched. It’s a very common feeling, felt by more than nine-tenths of the population, according to one study, and it’s even supported by some unusual scientists. However, mainstream psychologists have long understood that this is the result of confirmation bias: we tend to remember all the times we felt a tingle, turned around, and happened to be watching. We forget the times when we turned around and there was nothing.
So it’s at least possible that “sticky yawning” might have started as an appearance in noise: a random set of events picked up while standing in a crowd that seemed connected. The illusion could then become clearer as it was recorded in the learned works of Aristotle and others. When I spoke with Capitania on the phone, he suggested that what starts out as a delusion might persist as a learned behavior—that we might yawn contagiously because we know to yawn contagiously.
But what about these 30 years of scientific research? A large and varied research literature supports the central idea that seeing yawning, hearing yawning, or even reading about yawning increases the frequency of yawning in laboratory subjects. Additionally, yawning appears to spread to chimpanzees, domesticated dogs, parrots, and rats. If the prevalence of yawning were merely a product of our culture, a custom and a learned behavior, then how could we explain its contagiousness in animals?
It was much easier to dismiss Capitanius’ theory years ago, before we knew about the replication crisis in psychology and other fields. We have now seen several examples of large and diverse research literatures—even those spanning decades of work from dozens of different laboratories—turning out to be replete with suspect findings. Consider the theory of “ego depletion,” which states that human willpower acts as a limited resource or a muscle that can be exhausted. It started with a single study in the 1990s based on a simple lab exercise involving a plate of chocolate chip cookies. From there, it became a major area of research spanning hundreds of experiments. Other labs adapted the original study: They replaced the cookies with jelly beans or M&Ms; they tried the test on dogs, not humans; they came up with new ideas about what it means to exercise self-control. All these variations produced positive results.
Yawning: An Unsolved Mystery
Then, last year, a very careful attempt to reproduce the main idea of this study ended in a colossal failure. But what about all those subsequent studies that supposedly confirmed that ego depletion was real? The very fact of their diversity may have made them unreliable. The original experiment was transformed into a hundred different variations, and this gave the researchers dangerous freedom
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