What Determines Salt and Pepper Passage? A Brief Commentary on the Published Reports

In the spirit of openness and transparency, my attention was drawn to these papers because research of  was cited. On looking up the source , I was led to the other two.The first of the three recent works  is an investigation of the role that sex of requester and sex of sender might play in the behavior of passing the salt. In this proposal for a research study, Minér anticipated an opposite-sex effect, perhaps due to the factor of attraction. That is, salt passing would be faster when a male asks a female than when a male asks another male, and would also be faster when a female asks a male than when a female asks another female. This paper also generalized the discussion of the passage of salt to the passage of pepper, arguing that pepper would be passed more slowly than salt because it is less common to shake pepper over the chips and peanuts that would be present on the table in the experimental situation. It was speculated that pepper may be more likely to cause sneezing than salt, interfering with response time. This proposal was presented in some detail, with numbers backing up the predictions.

In the second publication, Minér et al. propose generalizing the work in another way: to investigate the attraction hypothesis directly by experimentally manipulating the attractiveness of the requester. This would be accomplished by creating an extra-long nose for half of the conditions. That is, the request is made by a person with a long nose or a normal short nose. My work  was cited because of the finding that schematic faces with long noses were rated as less attractive than faces with short noses. In addition, like Minér, Minér et al. included pepper passage along with salt passage. It was speculated that the combination of a long nose and pepper is special because together they might encourage more sneezing, causing a marked slowing of response time over and above the two main effects.  For more.....