20 Obvious Things Confirmed by Science

Brace yourself—these are shocking developments.

1. YOUR CAT IS IGNORING YOU.

Your tabby recognizes the sound of your voice, but it’s ignoring you anyway. A recent study at the University of Tokyo showed that, although a cat can identify its owner’s voice, it really doesn’t care enough to listen. The reason for kitty’s cold shoulder? Evolution. Unlike dogs, which were bred and domesticated by humans, cats domesticated themselves. They just aren’t hardwired to listen for commands.

2. STUDENTS WHO DO HOMEWORK GET HIGHER GRADES.

Economist Nick Rupp divided his class into two groups—those required to do homework, and those who were not. The results were (not) shocking. Kids who took home assignments had higher test scores and retention rates. To the delight of teachers everywhere, Rupp confirmed that “homework plays an important role in student learning.”

3. HIGH HEELS HURT.

High heels exaggerate your posture, tilt your hips, and shorten your stride. Some evolutionary psychologists argue they’re part of our primal urge to compete for mates. While that’s up for debate, science has confirmed that high heels are pretty much terrible for you. A study by the Institute for Aging Research found that 64 percent of older women who regularly wore unsupportive shoes—like high heels, pumps, or sandals—at some point in their life complained of foot pain.

4. PIGS LOVE MUD.

Pigs don’t have much in the way of sweat glands, which makes controlling body temperature a problem. So, for the longest time, scientists believed pigs wallowed in mud to keep cool. Although that’s true, a study in Applied Animal Behavior Science discovered an evolutionary twist: Porkers don’t roll in mud because they have just a few sweat glands; rather, they have a few sweat glands because they like to roll in mud. (Put differently, swine never developed sweat glands because their ancestors were always playing in muck!) Now some scientists believe a mud bath simply makes pigs happy. It’s a tautology, but pigs like mud because, well, they like mud.

5. CEREAL TASTES BETTER WITH MILK.

Scientists at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile did the unthinkable—they added water to corn flakes. They found that the “intermolecular interactions in the flake’s matrix could be weakened by the plasticizer, leading to the solubilization of some components, and ... a decrease in mechanical integrity.” Translated into English? Water makes cereal soggy. Milk, it turns out, is special. The fat content protects cereal from sucking in too much liquid, keeping it crispy.

6. MEN STARE AT WOMEN'S BOOBS.

In an article titled "My Eyes are Up Here," Sarah Gervais and her team used eye-tracking technology to confirm what we’ve long suspected—men like ogling at women’s chests. Men spent more time looking at a woman’s body than her face. Their eyes wandered the most if the woman had—surprise!—wide hips, a narrow waist, and large breasts. But women were just as guilty: They stared to scope out the competition.

7. OVEREATING CAN LEAD TO WEIGHT GAIN ...

Between the 1970s and now, the average adult in the U.S. gained 19 pounds. Research presented at the European Congress of Obesity in 2009 found that “weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories,” study leader Boyd Swinburn said. Laziness had little to do with America’s tightening belt.

8. ... AND EATING BAD FOOD IS BAD FOR YOU.

If you were holding out hope that fried chicken was a staple of a well-balanced diet, science has some bad news for you. A 2013 study in the American Journal of Medicine tracked the effect of eating habits on participants' health from middle-age on. The research involved assessing the diet of 5350 adults (age 51.3 ± 5.3 years, 29.4 percent women) and then tracked their mortality, chronic diseases and overall health after 16 years. The results: "[P]articipants with a 'Western-type' diet (characterized by high intakes of fried and sweet food, processed food and red meat, refined grains, and high-fat dairy products) had lower odds of ideal aging."

9. MEETINGS SUCK.

A 2005 study in Group Dynamics found that meetings are annoying time-sapping killjoys. By analyzing the diary entries of 37 university workers, researchers concluded that meetings make employees stressed and grumpy, hindering even the most motivated workers from getting things done.

10. READING IS GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN.

Your second grade teacher was right. Experts put Ph.D. candidates inside an MRI and had them read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. At one point, they were told to read for pleasure. Then they were told to read analytically (as if they were studying for a test). In both cases, their brains' blood flow increased. Under each condition, blood flowed to different parts of the noggin. Each style of reading prompted different—and beneficial—brain patterns. “Literary study provides a truly valuable exercise of people’s brains,” said project leader Natalie Phillips. Rejoice, English majors! (Here are a few other reasons you should be reading more.)

11. PARTY SCHOOLS LOVE TO PARTY.

It took a decade of research, but a team at Harvard School of Public Health finally did it—they confirmed Playboy’s sneaking suspicion. Students binge drank more if their school had a reputation for drinking and partying. The survey of 50,000 students at 120 colleges showed that, although the student body changes year by year, the ratio of heavy to casual drinkers stays the same.

12. THE INTERNET IS WHERE PRODUCTIVITY COMES TO DIE.

The Internet is an amazing tool with the power to do the world infinite good. But, wait. Look! It’s a bear riding a bicycle! According to Pew Research, 53 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 go online once a day just to waste time.

13. MEN AND WOMEN DESIRE A SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE PARTNER.

A team of researchers subjected willing undergrads to a word-association assignment to test how much they associate physical attractiveness with an ideal partner. Regardless of how the same participants responded when asked directly about the importance of appearance in a mate, they were quick to report positive feelings when shown words related to sexiness. "If a person tells me, for example, that she doesn't care about how attractive a guy is, our research suggests that her claim isn't worth all that much," study researcher Paul Eastwick, of Texas A&M University, said in a statement.

14. PEOPLE WILL BUY MORE FRUITS AND VEGETABLES IF THEY'RE CHEAPER.

Just because we've told you that all that fried food is bad for you doesn't mean you're going to change your ways—but there is one thing that is proven to encourage the purchase of more produce: discounts. A 2013 paper published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported on a trial done in Dutch supermarkets in which participants were given 50 percent off produce coupons, nutrition education, both, or neither. The researchers found that people bought and consumed more fruits and vegetables if they were given the coupons. They consumed even more if they got the discount and the education, but if they got just the education there was no effect. Of course, this is important information for crafting public health initiatives, but did they really need the study to know people prefer to spend less money?

15. MUSICIANS GET THE GIRLS.

Tales of rock stars and groupies provide more than enough anecdotal evidence to know this is true, but does the musician vibe really make a man more attractive if he's not in a world-famous band? Spoiler alert: yes. A French research team enlisted a young man (who was “previously evaluated as having a high level of physical attractiveness”) to stand on a street and request phone numbers from 300 different young ladies—all in the name of science, of course. For 100 such solicitations he was holding a guitar case; for another 100 he had a sports bag; and for the final 100, he was empty handed. According to the researchers, "Results showed that holding a guitar case was associated with greater compliance to the request, thus suggesting that musical practice is associated with sexual selection." No word on whether or not he followed up with any of the 31 percent of women who offered the apparent guitarist their digits.

16. STEREOTYPICALLY "SEXY" WAITRESSES GET BETTER TIPS.

One caveat: This whole study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, is based on self-reporting some rather personal details. But there's little cause to question findings that support such an obvious trend (not to mention Hooters' whole business model). Waitresses completed an online survey that included subjective assessments of their own attractiveness and sexiness as well as objective attributes like bust size, hair color, and tip amounts. You can probably predict what happened: "The waitresses’ tips varied with age in a negative, quadratic relationship, increased with breast size, increased with having blond hair, and decreased with body size."

17. "PRE-GAMING" BEFORE YOU HIT THE BAR MEANS MORE ALCOHOL OVERALL.

Imagine that: Drinks at home plus drinks at the bar equals more overall drinks. A study from Switzerland shows that the intent to defray the cost of alcohol out at the bar with a "pre-gaming" event doesn't really work. Instead, people still imbibe just as much while they're out on the town, which just gets added to their drinks from at home. According to LiveScience, "The study also found that those who pre-drank were more likely to suffer risky or unfavorable consequences of drinking, such as blackouts, hangovers, unplanned substance abuse or unprotected sex." That's probably a result of the more overall drinks.

18. PEOPLE CHANGE CLOTHES BASED ON THE WEATHER.

In 2007, researchers from Italy and Denmark published an article looking into people’s clothing choices depending on the weather and indoor environment. While it might seem obvious, the researchers were curious because many employees will drive to work inside a heated/cooled vehicle and then work for the day in a heated/cooled building. Ultimately, the researchers wrote “The outdoor temperature at 6 a.m. seems to affect people's choice of clothes the most.”

19. PEOPLE ARE HAPPIER WHEN THEIR SPOUSES ARE GENEROUS ... OR IF THEY'RE HAVING LOTS OF SEX.

The results of a survey of more than 1400 heterosexual couples between the ages of 18 and 46—all of whom had children—published in 2011 as part of the National Marriage Project showed that higher levels of reported generosity correspond to a happier marriage. That's right: People like getting backrubs, flowers and unsolicited acts of niceness, so much so it actually makes them happy. Of course, not as happy as regular sex might. While generosity is good, it was sexual satisfaction that proved to be the most consistent indicator of a happy marriage.

20. EXPERTS HAVE GOOD INTUITION

If you have an expensive handbag you’re worried might be counterfeit, would you rather trust the gut feeling of an expert or the carefully reasoned logic of an amateur? That’s the question a group of researchers from three universities answered in a 2012 study. They took a bunch of students and told them to identify real Coach/Louis Vuitton handbags from counterfeits. Some were told to base their judgement entirely on intuition, while others were told to be analytical. Among both groups were “experts,” or people with “more than three Coach and/or Louis Vuitton handbags.” According to a press release, “the researchers found that intuition was more effective for those with high expertise. In the intuition condition, participants with high expertise demonstrated higher task performance. In the analysis condition, those with high expertise performed no better than those with low expertise.”

Written by Lucas Reilly, Hannah Keyser, and Austin Thompson. Versions of this story ran in 2014 and 2015.