It makes you want to giggle and throw up at the same time, doesn’t it? From NewScientist (4 August 2018):
STUDENTS in the US who have a type of brain parasite carried by cats are more likely to be majoring in business studies. …
Now an analysis of almost 1300 US students has found that those who had been exposed to the parasite were 1.7 times more likely to be majoring in business. In particular, they were more likely to be focusing on management and entrepreneurship than other business-related areas.
The study also found that professionals attending business events were almost twice as likely to have started their own business if they were T. gondii positive, and that countries with a higher prevalence of the infection show more entrepreneurial activity.
This, from the abstract of the paper in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society B, is a lot more thought-provoking:
Disciplines such as business and economics often rely on the assumption of rationality when explaining complex human behaviours. However, growing evidence suggests that behaviour may concurrently be influenced by infectious microorganisms. The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii infects an estimated 2 billion people worldwide and has been linked to behavioural alterations in humans and other vertebrates. Here we integrate primary data from college students and business professionals with national-level information on cultural attitudes towards business to test the hypothesis that T. gondii infection influences individual- as well as societal-scale entrepreneurship activities.
Economic systems are built on an assumption of rationality in the actors of the system; when rationality is replaced, if partially, by the programmed inclinations of a micro-organism, it certainly goes a long way towards explaining the failures of those systems.
I wonder if anyone’s performed a similar study on investors, from the fearful mutual fund investors to the folks who invest in stocks with a beta in excess of a standard variation off the average, where beta is the average volatility in the price of stocks in a given category.
