10 Amazing Inverse Correlations

The world is full of inverse correlations that we pay little attention to. For example, the less water you drink, the hotter you feel on a summer day. It makes sense, and you're not likely to be surprised by it. Anything where two variables have an opposite relationship is fine, as long as the value of one variable, increasing, is related to the value of the other, decreasing. In many cases, this makes sense, but sometimes the relationship can be quite surprising.

10. The more you need to pee, the less you believe in free will.

What is your opinion on free will? Do you believe that you are truly in control of your actions and your destiny? Or do you feel that events are predetermined and you are on the path of fate whether you like it or not? Also, how long does it take you to pee right now?

Researchers trying to determine what makes a person more or less likely to believe in free will found a curious correlation back in 2014. Part of the survey asked participants to describe how they were feeling physically — whether they were hungry, tired, or needed to go to the bathroom. Those who needed to go the most were the least likely to believed into free will.

The study, which was very small and included only 81 people , makes sense. If you're in the middle of a survey and you keep getting the urge to urinate, it's not unreasonable to assume that you're being forced to submit to the will of your bladder rather than being in control of your destiny. Whether this has any profound philosophical implications remains to be seen.

9. The more the CEO earns, the worse the company performs.

Whenever CEO pay makes the news, it's usually not for a good reason. Often, it's to show how ridiculous it is overpay The people running the companies compared to the people who work for them on the ground. This has been a fairly common topic in the media for years. But what you hear less about is whether they're worth it. If a company is doing surprisingly well, maybe the CEO did something to earn that money, right? Maybe? Well, at least one study found that the opposite is true. The more the CEO makes, the worse the company does in the long run.

No matter how much the CEO gets paid, there is direct evidence that the company will work worse in terms of inventory and accounting performance over the next three years as that salary increased. The study looked at more than 1,500 large companies over a three-year period to gather empirical data to support this claim. It found that the top 5% companies in terms of CEO pay performed 15% worse than their peers.

A further study looked at 800 CEOs from 400 mid- and large-sized companies in the US. They compared CEO pay to shareholder returns from 2006 to 2015. The same result was found. If a person invested $100 in the 20% companies with the highest-paid CEOs, their investment would return$265 in 10 years . But if they had chosen the lowest paid CEOs, they would have earned $367. Of course, the difference is small, but such high salaries for those in charge raise doubts.

8. The more expensive the wedding, the higher the likelihood of divorce

For most people who get married, the wedding itself is a big deal. Some people demand an extravagant event that pushes all the limits. In 2020, the average cost of wedding in America was $20,300. The median household income in America that same year was $67,521 . So, people spend just under a third of what they earn in a year on weddings. But then you hear about those weddings that cost a fortune. Like Prince Charles and Princess Di, whose adjusted total went up by about 110 million dollars , or Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who spent 1 million dollars , as well as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, who spent almost $3 million.

Aside from the big spending, these couples have one more thing in common. Their expensive marriages didn't guarantee happiness, and they all ended up divorced. It turns out it's not just celebrities: Research shows that the more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you are to get divorced.

The same cost relationships exist with wedding rings , meaning that the more expensive the ring, the less likely the marriage will last. You are 1.3 times more likely to get divorced if your rings cost between $2,000 and $4,000 than if the ring costs less than $2,000. If your wedding costs over $20,000 , the likelihood of divorce is 1.6 times higher than if the wedding cost less than $1,000. This is based on data from 3,000 people.

If you're getting married and want to part with your money, don't lose hope. Couples who have a really great honeymoon are actually more likely to stay together.

7. The nicer you are, the less money you will make.

You know the saying, “nice guys finish last?” It’s usually reserved for conversations about romance, but it can actually apply to any situation in which someone might take a nice, kind approach, rather than a more aggressive and possibly unscrupulous one. And in business, it turns out that this is a tragic truth. The nicer you are as a person, the less money you’ll make. At least if you’re a guy.

Research has shown that nice men earn less, while it doesn't affect a woman's earning potential. This isn't great for women, mind you. It just means they don't have any advantage in any way, while a man has an advantage if he is perceived as unpleasant. An unpleasant person is perceived as tough, a good negotiator, and so on.

So what does nice mean? Being compassionate, helpful, friendly. You know, things you want to show others or experience from them. you will earn less money and get fewer promotions.

6. Children who start school earlier weigh more

Numerous school boards have been considering plans to change start times for years. Many thought it would reduce traffic congestion if kids didn't go to school and all the adults went to work. Maybe it would reduce accidents, pollution, and the like. But there was another side effect to changing start times. It turns out that the child goes to school earlier, the more it weighs.

When kids get less sleep, they seem to eat more fatty foods. For every extra hour of sleep a teenager gets, reduces the likelihood that he will eat high-calorie snacks throughout the day, on 21% . These students were more likely to eat between 5 and 7 a.m., leading to "metabolic stress" and dysfunction.

5. The more people die in any situation, the less people care.

Many people consider themselves compassionate and empathetic, and that’s great. You should care about others if you want to make the world a better place, you might argue. But you might also argue that there are limits to this compassion, and it’s backed by science. For example, in any given tragedy, the more victims there are, the less people care. It sounds completely counterintuitive, but that’s how our brains work.

Mass casualties can result from wars, natural disasters, and of course, pandemics like Covid-19. But people quickly become bored with news about such things. Our ability to empathize can hit a wall. It's called mental numbness .

Large numbers fail to evoke an emotional response in people. At some point, a large number is beyond our ability understand. Remember those games where you have to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar? People guess the numbers completely wrong because at a certain point they start to lose their meaning. Unfortunately, this puts jelly beans and death in the same boat.

4. The more you swear, the less pain you feel.

Do you like dirty talk? You should be. It turns out that swearing is a panacea that can cure whatever ails you, provided that what ails you is only a minor discomfort. The more you swear, the less pain you'll feel. This will come in handy the next time you stumble and are ready to drop the F-bomb.

More than 90 people were asked to dip their hands in ice water. They held it there until they began to feel pain from the cold. That was their pain threshold. In subsequent tests, participants were asked to do it again, only this time saying a few test words. One was the F-word, and the others were made up of curse words like " twizpipe ".

Only those who uttered the F-word were able to endure the pain longer, indicating that it had a pain-killing effect. The more they swore, the more pain they could tolerate.

3. As your weight increases, your sense of smell deteriorates.

Nowadays obesity is considered epidemic , and many people struggle with their weight. The reasons are varied and affect everything from a sedentary lifestyle to the types of foods we all eat, and more. And it turns out that your tendency to be obese is linked to your sense of smell. The worse your sense of smell, the more likely you are to be obese.

What's interesting is that this isn't a cause-and-effect effect, which you might assume from the way it's presented. People don't get fat because they can't smell. In fact, it's the other way around. They lose their sense of smell as they get fat. We know this because it was shown that bariatric surgery Restores improved sense of smell as you lose weight.

2. The cooking time of the paste is inversely proportional to the length of the stick.

How do you know when pasta is done? An experienced chef can get it right every time, but about thirds of respondents claim that they have difficulty preparing pasta, and the Internet is full of articles, which tells you all the ways you're doing it wrong. Luckily for those who don't know their agnolotti from their bucatini, there's a scientific way to tell how done your pasta is, and it all has to do with the inverse relationship between how long you cook the pasta and how close it is to another piece of pasta before it sticks together.

Researchers have studied the physics of what happens when pasta cooks and have found that as pasta cooks, stick length The length of the stick is “the distance two noodles stick together after you put them in and out of the water.” It’s proportional to the cooking time. And that means that no matter how you cook your pasta or how long you boil it (which can be an imprecise way to measure doneness), all you really need is a ruler. And some sense of how you like your pasta done.

If you're a fan of al dente, the ideal chopstick length is 30 millimeters For softer pasta, you will need 18 millimeters.

1. Spock's confidence in "Star Trek" was inversely proportional to its accuracy.

If you believe the random internet lists, Mr. Spock - the greatest character in history "Star Trek" , a franchise that has gone from strength to strength over seven decades. Creator Trek Gene Roddenberry once said that Mr. Spock, half human and half Vulcan, occupies central place in the themes show. Specifically, he was referring to themes of tolerance and humanity's ability to grow and mature. He follows the path of logic, like all Vulcans, and is portrayed as the smartest member of the original series' crew, capable of performing many complex calculations in his head.

Despite the fact that viewers are often told how smart Spock is and how logical his species is, the show doesn't back it up. Writer Julia Galef watched every episode "Treka" and every movie featuring Spock, and then calculated how often he made predictions and how often those predictions came true. The data showed that the more confident Spock was about the outcome, the more likely he was to be wrong. In fact, in 83% cases , when Spock called something impossible, he was proven wrong. That's a terrible track record. On the other hand, the more certain he was that something would happen, the more likely it was that it wouldn't happen at all.

Obviously, this is all a narrative device for a show that was trying to show human emotion and intuition trumps cold, alien logic, but you'd think they'd at least give him a 50/50 chance of success for being half human.