Holy prosociality! Batman makes people stand for pregnant passengers

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Masked Crusaders

It’s been a while since Ms. Feedback was pregnant, but she still remembers the difficulty of trying to find a seat on public transportation while having a belly the size and shape of a volleyball. Other passengers could not always be counted on to give up their seats.

But what if Feedback had snuck onto the bus, dressed as Batman? To our surprise and bewilderment, it might have made a difference. Researchers led by Francesco Pagnini tried this experiment on the Milan metro, in a study published in Mental health research npj in November 2025.

On 138 occasions, a female crew member wore a prosthesis and boarded a train, accompanied by an observer. In some of these trials, a third experimenter also came on board, in a Batman costume. The outfit included “the signature cape, logo and pointy hood, making it easily recognizable”, although they omitted the mask “to avoid potentially frightening passengers”.

The feedback looked at the photo of the costume in the newspaper and we can say with complete confidence: no one was going to be afraid. It looks like the suit George Clooney wore Batman and Robinand that wouldn’t scare anyone.

Regardless, passengers offered their seats to the “pregnant” woman 67% of the time when Batman was present, compared to 38% when he was absent. The implication, according to the team, is that “unexpected events can promote prosociality.” Notably, passengers often did not consciously notice Batman: 44% of those who had given up their seat in the presence of the Caped Crusader said they had not seen him.

It occurred to Feedback that perhaps Batman, being a longtime social justice warrior, made the passengers think about concepts like fairness and decency. Researchers have thought about this too, but they point out that experiments on social priming have often failed, with priming being one of the phenomena that has fallen foul of the “replication crisis” in the social sciences. Hence their focus on the unexpected in Batman.

Extrapolating, the team suggests that “psychologists might consider ways to integrate ‘positive disruptions’ into daily life,” such as “artistic or theatrical interventions in public spaces” that would “momentarily break routine and engage individuals more deeply in their environment and community.” All of this reminds Feedback of the concept of “nudging” people into better behavior, which, like social priming, has generally not been replicated. In any case, that would require a lot of costumes.

Maybe that says something about where Feedback has lived, but we’d barely look twice if someone got on the train dressed as Batman. We’d just assume they were going to their local comic convention. Perhaps the Milanese cosplay scene is less dynamic than elsewhere.

Read to me

Comments have previously noted the phenomenon of academics using pop culture references in the titles of their articles, or writing fanciful titles in the hope of persuading us to read their work. It’s a tricky line to walk, but when it hits, it hits. So kudos to Rebekah White and Anna Remington for their 2018 study titled “Object Personification in Autism: This Article Will Be Very Sad If You Don’t Read It.”

It explores how often autistic and non-autistic people personify non-living objects and how this affects their emotional lives. At first, Feedback thought we hadn’t – our vacuum cleaner remains resolutely anonymous – but then we recalled that we tend to name our cars (we currently drive Kitty, having sold Carol because she was trash) and our bikes.

Clearly, we are not alone. When the post was shared on social media recently, one user responded: “Well we just had a serious discussion about whether the robot vacuum was a boy or a girl and what his name could be.” » Comments may answer this question: put a brown floppy hat and big black eyebrows on it, and name it after the iconic Mario evil, the Goomba. This will rhyme with at least one brand.

Another said: “I always grab an extra croissant or roll from the counter if it’s the last one left after I’ve taken the amount I need. Otherwise the poor thing will worry and be upset that no one needs it…” Commenters do this too, but for different reasons.

Critic 2 strikes again

Before an academic can have a paper published, they must first undergo peer review, during which other researchers critique their work (often anonymously). So academics talk about “critic 2” in the same way we talk about Satan, Pol Pot, or people who talk in the silence of train cars.

Historian Andre Pagliarini took to social media to report a particularly egregious case of peer review: “a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted that I had failed to implicate the work of a certain Andre Pagliarini.”

As others were quick to point out, this is a “hell if you do…” situation, because if Pagliarini had included more quotes from his own work, he would either be accused of self-promotion or his paper would be rejected for lack of novelty.

The comments led us to mentally utter the same sentence that others wrote in response: “But doctor, I am Pagliarini.” And if you don’t understand this joke, you’re out of luck, because Feedback doesn’t have enough room to explain it anymore.

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