Cérémonie 2013 des Ig Nobel

Le IG Nobel récompensent les travaux de recherche qui "font rire puis réfléchir".

Boire de l'alcool fait-il se sentir beau ? Le laboratoire de psychologie de Grenoble, pour s'être penché très sérieusement sur la question, a reçu jeudi 12 septembre à Harvard un "Ig Nobel", un prix récompensant les travaux de recherche qui "font rire puis réfléchir".

L'étude en question, publiée en mai 2012 dans le British Journal of Psychology, avait montré que plus on boit d'alcool, plus on se trouve séduisant, cette meilleure perception de soi n'étant pas due aux effets pharmacologiques de l'alcool mais à un effet placebo.

"En psychologie, aucun Français n'avait encore reçu d'Ig Nobel, ça nous a bien fait rire quand on a appris la nouvelle", a réagi Laurent Bègue, directeur du laboratoire inter-universitaire de psychologie (Lip) de Grenoble.

La suite sur le site du Nouvel Observateur

• MEDICINE PRIZE: for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice.
• PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.
• JOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY: for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way.
• SAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE: for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops a hijacker through trap doors
• PHYSICS PRIZE: for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond — if those people and that pond were on the moon.
• CHEMISTRY PRIZE: for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized.
• ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE: for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days
• PEACE PRIZE: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.
• PROBABILITY PRIZE: for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.
• PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: for the medical techniques described in their report "Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam"

Source : Nouvel Observateur, Ig Nobel