Iain Murray: Better watch out, there’s a pseudo-researcher about

No sooner has your columnist wondered what it must be like to be trailed by a behavioural scientist than an answer of sorts comes to hand. Last week, I recounted how Kate Fox – an anthropologist and director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford – followed 1,000 users of mobile phones in a study into the evolution and effects of gossip. She concluded that cellular phones were indeed used primarily for gossiping, and that women were better at it than men. And with that she withdrew, leaving, like a puff of smoke in the air, the unanswered question of what it must have been like to have Ms Fox at your elbow night and day, assessing the quality of your small talk.

Now news comes in that 1,000 other people (I assume they were different; it would be very bad luck to be caught twice) have suffered a similar ordeal, at the hands of psychologist Professor David Warburton of Reading University, who was called in by vintner Piat D’Or to investigate the decline in dinner parties.

That in itself raises some questions. Why does Piat D’Or’s marketing department assume that the dinner party is in decline? Was nobody inviting them any more? And how did they pick out Prof. Warburton? Did someone say: “I know just the man – old Dave Warburton at Reading. He’s the world’s leading expert on the decline of dinner parties. What he doesn’t know about not eating in other people’s homes isn’t worth knowing. You should read his seminal work, From Soup to Nuts: the Atrophy of Entertaining in a Social Context – it’s a corker!”

Once commissioned, Prof. Warburton set about his task with the verve and diligence for which Reading University is renowned. He rounded up 1,000 people and asked them about dinner parties. Then he singled out 16 couples, to be shadowed as they prepared to receive parties of eight friends for an evening at home. “Why 16?” I hear you ask. Why not 20? Why indeed? Perhaps four escaped and are still at large in the Home Counties, occasionally emerging wild-eyed, and under cover of darkness, to forage for takeaway pizzas.

Those left behind had a bad time of it. The Professor, hovering at their elbow as they opened the oven door and pulled out the charred remains of coq au vin with truffles in an armagnac sauce, peered through the acrid fumes and noted a condition which he was later to describe as Kitchen Performance Anxiety (KPA).

He defines the syndrome thus: “[KPA is] the fear of one’s cooking and entertainment being judged and evaluated negatively by other people, which would lead to feelings of embarrassment, inadequacy, humiliation and the avoidance of entertaining”.

Prof. Warburton finds one in eight host(esse)s suffering from KPA; 61 per cent said the pressure of holding a dinner party was worse than that of an interview or a first date; and nearly 90 per cent could not relate to celebrity chefs and their creations. The professor points to celebrity chefs as a primary cause of KPA.

This blizzard of statistics was clearly a case for the Society for Gathering Useless Facts and Figures (SoGuff), of which I have the honour of being lifetime president.

After lengthy investigation, SoGuff’s Acronym Research Sub-committee Executive (Arse) concluded that KPA was in fact a form of RPN (Researcher Proximity Neurosis). This finding implies no criticism of Prof. Warburton and his team, whose error is understandable given that the symptoms of the two conditions are indistinguishable.

For instance, the Professor – standing behind one hostess as she watched her soufflé sink – noted the following: “Mental block (‘freezing up’ while cooking), mental distraction (lack of concentration, sensitivity to noise and onlookers) and physical symptoms (difficulty in breathing, nausea and headaches).”

This list shows a startling similarity to the findings of SoGuff’s researchers, whose experiment involved placing – for a minimum of six hours – a bespectacled man with a clipboard within a gnat’s proboscis-length of 1,000 people, chosen at random. The subjects were then taken on a first date or forced to meet Anthony Worrall-Thompson.

Forty-two per cent of subjects suffered a mental block (loss of the power of speech); 60 per cent were afflicted by mental distraction (repeatedly asked where the nearest lavatory/phone/bus stop was); and an amazing 80 per cent suffered physical symptoms (bulging eyes, gritted teeth, clenched fists, throbbing temples, red mist). Some 23 per cent attempted to remove the researcher’s teeth with the aid of his own clipboard.

RPN is defined as “The fear that one’s hands will reach out, clutch the throat of one’s attendant behavioural scientist and keep squeezing until his eyes pop and his tongue lolls out, which would lead to feelings of arrest, interrogation, charging, arraignment, sentencing, humiliation and the avoidance of entertaining.”

As an aside, we asked our team to investigate the decline in dinner parties. After a moment’s thought, they cited the drink-driving laws, a surfeit of Piat D’Or (or Golden Pee, as the bons vivants of the fading dinner-party circuits of Bromley and Penge call it), and a gro

wing recognition that to entertain or be entertained in private homes is among the most refined forms of social torture known to man.