Hisashi Murakami, a Japanese researcher, has won a mock Ig Nobel Prize for his research on “smartphone zombies” for the fifteenth consecutive year.
The Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine, organizes the award.
At the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Hisashi Murakami teaches collective behavioral science as an assistant professor. His autonomic act of single mass captivated the audience.
Pedestrians crossing an intersection without colliding—almost as if under an invisible command—is an illustration of that process, which Murakami calls self-organization.
Murakami put together a team to investigate how smartphone zombies disrupt pedestrian flow in order to better understand the mechanics of this kind of human behavior.
On September 9, 2024, the group received the Ig Nobel Prize for Kinetics.
“I was left wondering why (our project) was found to be amusing,” the 34 year old Murakami said.
Normally, the winner receives a trophy, but this year, Murakami received digital data attached to an email that he could put together himself.
It appeared fragile enough to be blown away by an air conditioner when he printed it out on paper and put the prize together.
In January 2024, Murakami became a member of the Kyoto Institute of Technology.
“I spent my younger days in a daze,” he said. “I suppose it’s a shame that I don’t have any interesting episodes from my childhood to share.”
A pivotal moment occurred when Murakami became interested in examining the relationships between individuals in a mass of people after joining a research group at Kobe University.
Murakami traveled to Iriomotejima island in Okinawa Prefecture for his master’s course to study how crabs interact when hundreds of thousands of them gather in one location. After that, he and his colleagues raised 100 “ayu” sweetfish for his doctoral thesis.
Murakami came to the conclusion that self-organization is the foundation of large gatherings where people freely move while forming a mass as a result of his observations of the natural world.
Murakami investigated behavioral changes in his subjects by obstructing their senses of hearing, smell, sight, and other senses in order to support his findings.
Understanding that a smartphone’s narrow screen significantly limits a user’s field of vision, Murakami’s team investigated smartphone zombies to determine how they interfere with traffic flow.
While three students on the right were glued to their smartphones, Hisashi Murakami and his colleagues observed two groups of college students in Tokyo in December 2019 as they were asked to walk normally down a street.
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The team watched as two groups of 27 college students passed by and approached one another from opposite directions.
One group of three people was given the task of walking while utilizing their smartphones. But they and the others were able to always move aside and avoid a collision, which made them and the others slow down.
When the researchers discovered that the participants’ sense of vision was not the only thing that enabled them to recognize one another’s movements, they were still left with more questions than answers.
“You may be amazed by how fish and birds don’t collide with each other when they travel en masse, but humans also have a similar ability,” Murakami said. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
