Between Subjects

Why the retelling drifts

A finding gets simpler every time it is repeated. The qualifier goes first, then the sample size, then the condition that made it work. What is left is a clean story that the paper does not support — and it is usually the version that gets taught.

These videos go back to what was actually measured. Often the real finding is stranger than the myth: Milgram ran more than twenty variations and the prod that sounded most like a direct order was the one nobody obeyed; Robbers Cave worked on the second attempt, after the first collapsed because the boys had been allowed to become friends first.

Just as often the correction cuts the other way. The Kitty Genovese story is mostly wrong and the bystander effect is real anyway. Saying so is the point — how each episode is checked.

Latest episodes

• Did you know? A bowerbird rebuilt its illusion in three days

  14 October 2026

  Male great bowerbirds place the smallest objects nearest the female’s viewing position and larger ones further away, creating forced perspective; when researchers reversed the size gradient the males restored it within about three days, and males producing the strongest illusions mated most - though why the illusion helps is unresolved.

• Did you know? Alligators balance sticks in bird nesting season

  13 October 2026

  Mugger crocodiles and American alligators were observed resting with sticks balanced on their snouts, predominantly during the weeks when wading birds were gathering nest material, which is hard to explain as debris landing at random - though no bird was ever observed being caught this way, and most of the watching was done at captive sites.

• Did you know? A fish scraped a mark it could only see in a mirror

  12 October 2026

  Cleaner wrasse given a visible mark under the skin spent time at a mirror positioned to show it, then scraped that spot on the substrate - doing neither with an invisible mark or without a mirror. Whether that is self-recognition, a parasite-removal reflex aimed at an apparent neighbour, or a response to a mark they could feel as well as see, is unresolved and argued in print.

• Did you know? Ravens chose a tool for a job 17 hours away

  10 October 2026

  Ravens chose a tool or a bartering token for use up to 17 hours later, performing as well as apes and better than chimpanzees at bartering, and whether that reflects planning for the future or well-trained association is still argued in print.

• Did you know? Cheetahs accepted skin grafts from strangers, all 14

  9 October 2026

  Fourteen reciprocal skin grafts between unrelated cheetahs were all accepted, while domestic cat skin grafted onto the same animals was rejected normally - showing the immune systems worked and the cheetahs were simply too genetically alike to tell each other’s tissue apart, though later methods found more diversity than the 1985 techniques could see.

• Did you know? Dolphins answered their own whistle, voice stripped out

  8 October 2026

  Wild bottlenose dolphins off Scotland were played synthetic copies of their own signature whistles, stripped of voice characteristics so only the contour remained, and the group called that whistle back in 8 of 12 trials - significantly more than for whistles belonging to familiar or unfamiliar animals.

All 31 episodes →