Quirkology by Richard Wiseman Read Free Book Online Page A

piece of social history.
     
    So far, I have been exploring how, and why, people manipulate their own and their children’s birth dates. An even stranger aspect of chronopsychology, however, has examined a more morbid topic: the relationship between the date of birth and the time of death.
     

CHRONOPSYCHOLOGY AND THE GRIM REAPER
     
    David Phillips, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, is fascinated by death. Unlike many medical researchers, who are concerned with why people die, Phillips is more concerned with when. Specifically, he is interested in whether people are able to postpone death until after a moment of important emotional significance. He has devoted his career to the topic, starting in 1970, when he published a doctoral dissertation with the curious title “Dying as a Form of Social Behavior.”
     
    Phillips is intrigued by the notion that people can exert enough control over their bodies to delay their demise for a small, but vital, period of time. Just long enough, it seems, to allow them to enjoy an important national or personal event. There is certainly some anecdotal evidence to support the notion. Charles Schulz, the multimillionaire cartoonist and creator of the “Peanuts” strip, died on the eve of the publication of his last comic strip. The final cartoon contained a farewell letter signed by Schulz. Also, no fewer than three American presidents, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe, all died on July 4, thus raising the intriguing possibility that they held on long enough to ensure an auspicious date of death.
     
    In one piece of research, Phillips examined whether people are more likely to die directly after a national holiday. There seemed little point in looking at mortality rates immediately before and after Christmas because any significant rise in reported deaths could have been caused by the fact that the temperature tends to decrease throughout December. Rather than try to convince entire nations to celebrate Christmas in randomly determined months, Phillips searched for another national festival that took place at a different time each year. That is when he found the Chinese Harvest Moon Festival. In this highly traditional celebration, a festival that moves around the calendar from year to year, the senior woman of the household directs her daughters in the preparation of an elaborate meal. An examination of Chinese death records around the event showed that the death rate dipped by 35 percent in the week before the festival and peaked by the same amount in the week after. 35
     
    One of Phillips’s largest studies investigated whether date of birth influenced date of death. 36 Analyzing almost 3 million California death certificates between 1969 and 1990, Phillips reported that a woman is more likely to die during the week after her birthday than at any other time of the year. In contrast, a man is more likely to die during the week before his birthday. Phillips argued that this may be because women look forward to birthdays as times of celebration, whereas men are more likely to use birthdays to take stock of their lives; in doing so, they realize how little they have achieved in life, become stressed, and therefore increase their chances of dying. According to Phillips, these findings are not a result of seasonal fluctuations, of people misreporting the information on their relatives’ death certificates, of putting off life-threatening surgery, or of committing suicide. Instead, he argues that the data supports the notion that some people are capable of “willing” themselves to live longer, or of cutting short their lives.
     
    The idea is highly controversial, and it has attracted a great deal of debate. 37 Some researchers have been able to replicate the types of patterns found by Phillips and his team; others have failed to find such results or have attacked the methods used to conduct the work. Nevertheless, the idea that psychological