"The entire research literature on contagious yawning could be bogus"

"In a new paper, titled “Are Yawns Really Contagious? A Critique and Quantification of Yawn Contagion,” lead author Rohan Kapitány, a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University, argues that research on this topic suffers from a wide array of methodological problems and that these problems are so significant that they have almost certainly led to the mischaracterization of spontaneous, naturally occurring yawns as “contagious” ones. “The observation that yawning is contagious may have arisen as a consequence of our tendency to see patterns and causation where none exists, to misinterpret the clumpiness of randomness as something else,” he argues.. 

Kapitány’s yawns-aren’t-contagious case seems prima facie wrong. That yawns might spread from man to man is not some flashy theory concocted by psychologists in the 1980s but a widely held intuition that’s been around for millennia. “Why do men generally themselves yawn when they see others yawn?” asks the Problemata, an ancient text attributed to Aristotle. Even then, the question was phrased as if the fact of the phenomenon were self-evident. The idea spread and reappeared in Western literature and science over centuries... Then again, the mere fact that a view is widely held, or that it’s been held for many generations, does not make it true. Aristotle’s Problemata, for example, follows on its question about contagious yawns with another that now seems slightly out of date: “Why do men, while standing next to fire, have the desire to pee?” it asks."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/03/the_entire_research_literature_on_contagious_yawning_could_be_bogus.html?wpsrc=sh_all_tab_tw_top

FB: "When I talked to Kapitány on the phone, he suggested that what starts off as a fallacy could then sustain itself as a learned behavior—that we might yawn contagiously because we know that we’re supposed to yawn contagiously"