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Furscience
A Decade of Psychological Research
on the Furry Fandom
Furscience
A Decade of Psychological Research on the Furry Fandom
Edited by
Courtney N. Plante
Bishop’s University
Stephen Reysen
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Camielle Adams
University of Calgary
Sharon E. Roberts
Renison University College, University of Waterloo
Kathleen C. Gerbasi
Niagara County Community College
International Anthropomorphic Research Project
Commerce, Texas, USA
ISBN-13: 978-0-9976288-3-8
Copyright © 2023 Authors
Commerce, Texas, USA
Cover Art by @echoofjustice
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1 – What is All of This?
Chapter 1 – An Introduction to This Book 1
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 2 – Furry 101: A (Brief) history of the Furry Fandom 7
Joe Strike
Chapter 3 – Furtuity: The Story of Furscience 19
Kathleen Gerbasi, Courtney “Nuka” Plante, Sharon E.
Roberts, Stephen Reysen, Elizabeth Fein
Chapter 4 – A (Not Too painful) Introduction to Research Methods 39
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Part 2 – Furries Doing Furry Things
Chapter 5 – What’s a Furry? 95
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 6 – Being Furry: Fanship versus Fandom 131
Stephen Reysen & Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 7 – Fursonas – Up Close and Fursonal 157
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 8 – Fursuited for Success 207
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 9 – Makin’ Stuff, Takin’ Stuff: Furry Content 231
Stephen Reysen, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 10 – OwO What’s This? Sex and Pornography 259
Thomas R. Brooks, Frances H. I. Henry, Anna R. Henry,
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 11 – Fuzzy Lines: Subgroups and Furry-Adjacent Groups 285
Stephen Reysen, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 12 – The Drama Llama: Conflict and Gatekeeping 317
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Part 3 – By the Numbers: Furry Demographics
Chapter 13 – Generation Furry: Age, Socioeconomic Status, and
Relationships 375
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 14 – Racialized Identity Groups and Ethnicity
in the Furry Fandom. 411
Sharon E. Roberts, Camielle Adams, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 15 – Sex and Gender in the Furry Fandom 443
Anna Renee Henry, Frances H. I. Henry, Sharon E. Roberts,
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 16 – Sexual Orientation in the Furry Fandom 497
Frances H. I. Henry, Anna Renee Henry
Chapter 17 – Furry Beliefs: Religion and Politics 545
Courtney “Nuka” Plante, Camielle Adams
Part 4 – It’s All in Your Head: Furry Psychology
Chapter 18 – From All Walks: Individual Differences 571
Stephen Reysen, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 19 – Purring Motors: Fan Drive and Motivation 607
Stephen Reysen, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 20 – The Animal Within: Animal Attitudes and Therianthropy 637
Kathleen Gerbasi, Elizabeth Fein, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 21 – Haters Gonna Hate: Furry Stigma 657
Stephen Reysen, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 22 – The Kids Are Alright: Furry Well-Being and Mental Health 683
Stephen Reysen, Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Chapter 23 –Autism in the Furry Fandom: Opportunities, Barriers, and
Recommendations 705
Elizabeth Fein, Amy Adelman
Chapter 24 – Furry Identity, Furry Capital, and Intrasonas: Merging
Quantitative, Qualitative, and Anthropological Findings to Form the Furry
Fandom Identity Resolution Model (FFIRM) 733
Sharon E. Roberts
Part 5 – Curtain Call
Chapter 25 – An Ongoing Tail: Where Do We Go From Here? 773
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
Author Biographies 777
Acknowledgments
Furscience is, and has always been from its very start, a collaborative
effort. And, just like a Broadway show, it’s easy for an audience watching
from the outside to forget that the actors on stage represent just a fraction of
all the people needed to make a production happen!
In this spirit, we at Furscience would like to collectively thank all the
people who’ve helped us to get where we are today, without whom this book
would not be possible. We’ll endeavor to recognize every person who’s
helped us along the way, but realize that it’s a herculean task: Furscience
represents the cumulative contribution of hundreds of people (not to mention
tens of thousands of furries who’ve generously given their time and effort for
free to help us with our research). Despite our best efforts, we will almost
certainly forget to mention people. This oversight should be seen as a
reflection on the frailty of the human memory and on our humble recognition
of how many people we owe a great thanks to, and not as our being
ungrateful for everything that so many people have done to help us over the
years!
Kathy Gerbasi
I would like to extend a huge thanks to all of the research assistants we’ve
worked with over the years, without whom there would never have been any
furry research! In alphabetical order, and to the best of my ability to recall,
they are Charlie Aquilina, Ashley Borelli, Eric Broeker, Troj Brueghel, Mike
Cline, Carlos Darby, Emma Verratti DeChellis, James Ducas, Erika
Edwards, Caitlin Fulle, Tim Gadawski, Anthony Hartman, Rebecca Hewitt,
Justin Higner, Dan Kish, Elise Koepke, Darryl Lockie, Jared McCaffrey,
Brian Mendel, Nick Paolone, Anthony Paterno, Adam Privitera, Tristan
Puffer, Jennifer Raymond, Isaia Sciabarrasi, Joe Vullo.
In addition to the aforementioned individuals, most of whom have been
my students, and the thousands of furries who have participated in the
research over the past 10 years, I would also like to especially thank
Laurence “Green Reaper” Parry, William Conde, Michael Brenner, and
Douglas Muth (Giza) for their continued support and interest in furry
research and Simona Ghai for her amazing transcription abilities.
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
I began this undertaking as a graduate student, at a time when my
confidence in the project was shaky and when I wasn’t sure whether what I
was doing would kill my career prospects or not. In that regard, I’d like to
extend a big thanks to my graduate school supervisor, Dr. Richard Eibach,
and to his partner Dr. Steve Mock, both of whom helped to develop the
research skills I still use today and who helped me to balance my eagerness
and enthusiasm to run off and do this wacky line of research with the need to
stay grounded and pragmatic. In this same vein, I’d also like to thank my
colleagues, in particular Kathy, Stephen, and Sharon. I consider myself to be
the luckiest graduate student who ever lived because of them; while most
graduate students only have one supervisor, I was lucky enough to have four
mentoring me through a tough time in my life. Any success I have today can
be attributed to their combined efforts.
I’d also like to thank the furries I’ve met over the years who’ve been
instrumental in either directly helping with our research or who’ve helped me
personally as a person who does furry research. This includes, but is in no
way limited to, the Alberta Furries, the Waterloo Furries, and the UW
Bronies Club. In particular, I’d like to thank Edolon, who introduced me to
Kathy in the first place, Kaa, who was instrumental in both moral support
and helping set up and run a computerized experiment at a furry convention.
Thank you to the podcasts Fur What it’s Worth and Furcast, both of whom
were early supporters of our research and helped us to disseminate our
findings to furries around the world! Similarly, thank you to Greenreaper for
helping us to signal boost our findings on Flayrah and for being such an
enthusiastic supporter of our work.
Thank you to all of the convention staff who’ve helped us to conduct
research at their conventions, including accommodating all of our strange
requests. This includes a myriad of staff members at Texas Furry Fiesta (e.g.,
Istanbul, Glass), Anthrocon (e.g., Kage, Giza), Further Confusion (e.g.,
Carbon), Oklacon (e.g., Lenny and Andy), Furnal Equinox, Canfurence,
Eurofurence, Fur-Eh, and Furality (e.g., Alofoxx)!
I’d also like to thank the numerous furry scholars, many of whom have
provided valuable input, feedback, perspective, and criticism of our work,
which has only helped to make it better! This includes Troj, who’s been a
fantastic soundboard against which to bounce clinical ideas, Hazel (Bobbi)
Ali Zaman, who always provides excellent perspective and pushes us to
consider a more phenomenological look at our work, Yerf, whose criticism
has been a productive creative friction, and to Camielle (Kirisis) Adams,
who, in addition to editing this book and offering invaluable perspective and
research ideas on political science and BIPOC issues, I also consider to be a
dear friend!
Finally, I’d like to extend a huge thanks to my friend and fellow furry
Ocean, who’s single-handedly the person most responsible for both my
journey into the furry fandom and into what would eventually become
Furscience!
Sharon Roberts
There are so many people who have worked behind the scenes to make
Furscience possible. If not for the institutions, journals, and funding agencies
who saw the promise in our early work, we would not have succeeded.
Thank you to our funders for assisting us with some of the many research
projects that are presented in this book: Renison University College for seed
funding; start-up grants from the University of Waterloo; thank you to The
Bob Harding and Lois Claxton Humanities and Social Sciences Endowment
Fund; and a heartfelt thank you to SSHRC for the ability to say: This
research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council. So, thank you so much, Tom, for teaching me
how to write better grant applications. Live long and prosper, friend.
I am grateful for the many conventions and their incredible staff who
have helped us succeed, many of whom have already been mentioned by my
colleagues. However, a personal thank you from me and Malicious Beaver
goes out to the organizers of Anthrocon, CanFURence, ConFuzzled,
Eurofurence, NordicFuzzCon, Furnal Equinox, Oklacon, Furality,
Owomacon, Texas Furry Fiesta, Furpoint, VancouFur, Alamo City Furry
Convention, Further Confusion, and Furry Pinas. We are so grateful for these
partnerships and friendships. We also give a heartfelt thank you to many
wonderful people in the furry community who have worked tirelessly with
Malicious Beaver in the background on all kinds endeavors. There are so
many of you, but we send a special thanks to Dr. Conway, Arc Husky, Jacob,
Tempe O’Kun, Cheetah Spotty Cat, Jyanon, GerMANshep, Trax, Arrkay,
Andy, Lenny, and Moms of Furries. Your guidance, generosity, and kindness
are so appreciated by both of us.
Thank you to our dedicated students, research assistants, and Furscience
volunteers: Chelsea, Kayla, Abigail, Marie-Michelle, Scott, Roula, Rebekah,
Simona, Kendra, Jacklyn, Kim, Iona, Anna, Charles, Troj, Dawn, Asher, and
many others.
I feel such gratitude when I think of Professor James Côté. Thank you for
investing so much energy and time in my education and for continuing to
mentor me through my entire academic journey. What a privilege it has been
for me to learn from you over the past quarter century. Also, thank you so
much for your feedback and encouragement regarding the Furry Fandom
Identity Resolution Model (FFIRM), which is making its debut in Chapter 24
of this book.
My heartfelt thank you goes to our Creative and Communications
Director, Malicious Beaver, for your endless dedication to Furscience and
me. And, thank you to my fellow Furscience colleagues—my dear friends. I
am so grateful for your patience and wisdom. I feel so fortunate to have had
the chance to help write this story of Furtuity.
Finally, thank you to the amazing furry community that has made us feel
so welcomed in furry spaces. As I tell the students in my Research Method
course, participants who share the details of their lives are offering
researchers the most precious of gifts. Learning about the ebb and flow of so
many furries’ lives has been a remarkable privilege. Thank you to the furry
fandom for participating in our many studies and supporting this research.
We are grateful.
Stephen Reysen
Thank you to Tanner McCarter, Jessica Gamboa, Amanda Gamboa, and
Jessie Kierbow who have been on our Texas Furry Fiesta crew for many
years (and hopefully many more to come). Also, thank you to students who
have helped in the past: Catherine Schroy, Jamie Snider, Jason Lloyd, and
Justin Miller. Lastly, thanks to Eduardo Soliz.
Elizabeth Fein
I'd like to acknowledge Jennifer Bradley, Ben Gaddes, José G. Luiggi-
Hernández, and Gabriela Mena Ibarra.
Camielle Adams
Wow, I never thought that I would be making this type of statement for a
non-fiction publication, but here I am. Life has certainly sent a variety of
tests and challenges my way, but I’m very grateful to have been presented
with all of the unique opportunities that I have been given. I hope with each
and every publication I’m asked to participate in, my works enlighten and
invigorate others to further explore and seek out their understanding.
Remember, if we all do one thing each day that positively impacts someone
else, then little by little, we can change the world.
First and foremost, I would like to thank The Creator for my talents and
my ability to endure while this thing I call my life unfolded around me. I
would also like to thank my loving husband, Ocean, for his love and late-
night snacks. Really and truly, I would be so lost without him. He truly is the
moon to my sun. I would also like to thank my godparents, Tonae & Earle,
Irene, and Cathy for their encouragement and for checking in on me while
things have been so rough at times. Likewise, many thanks to my cousin,
Elaine, who sent me many prayers of strength and patience. I would also like
to thank Dr. Courtney “Nuka” Plante for including me in this endeavor. It’s
been a lot of fun and as a lifelong nerd, this research and editing has been an
awesome experience.
Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank my mother, Dee, for
laying the groundwork for me as a kid to view knowledge, research, and just
reading as a fun and engaging activity. Though you’re no longer with us,
your legacy and love can be felt at every summit that I reach, now and
forever. Remember to hug dholes!
Part 1
What is All of This?
1
Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Book
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
You know those moments in life where you just stop, look around, and
ask yourself “How the heck did I get here?”
That’s what this book is: A chance for us, the members of the Furscience
team, to take stock of where we are and how we got here.
Let me explain.
Since 2011 we, a team of social scientists who call ourselves Furscience,
have been scientifically studying the furry fandom—conducting online and
in-person surveys, interviews, focus groups, and experiments to better
understand what makes furries tick.1 In the time since then, we’ve conducted
dozens of studies on tens of thousands of furries from around the globe, on
subjects such as what motivates furries, furry well-being, relationships in the
furry fandom, furries’ attitudes toward animals, the functions of fursonas,
identity formation and maturation in fandom spaces, and fandom conflict, to
name just a few. When we began, there was relatively little psychological
literature on the subject of furries at a time when a lot of news outlets,
television shows, and haters online had a lot to say about furries. And so we
did what all good academics strive to do: we published our research to try
and bring knowledge to a subject people cared about.
We published our research in academic journals, book chapters, and
online on our own website in a relatively piecemeal fashion. Scientific
journal articles and book chapters represented a deep dive into very specific,
thin slices of furry behavior while our website regularly showed off the
results of our most recent studies. We did this for the better part of a decade,
gradually accumulating a bigger and bigger pile of published articles and
chapters and growing our online repository of findings by tacking on each
new study like a post-it note on an increasingly busy office whiteboard. With
each passing year, we focused on putting out more articles and adding more
data to our website, with little time to do anything else because as soon as we
finished analyzing the data from one study, we were already putting together
the materials for the next study—there was always one more convention to
go to, one more sample to get.
1 As we explain in Chapter 3, some individual members of our team have been
conducting studies since as early as 2006, but we didn’t unite as the Furscience team
until 2011!
2
And then, in 2020, the world was brought to a screeching halt by a global
pandemic. Quarantines put a stop to furry conventions for the better part of
two years, as well as to regular academic activities. As professors, we were
still holding online classes but, aside from that, we, like the rest of the world,
were all stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for the pandemic to end. The
breakneck cycle of data collection, analysis, planning, and then more data
collection stopped along with everything else. With no conventions to attend,
we suddenly found ourselves with some uncharacteristic free time on our
hands.
That’s when we took a step back and realized that, in more than a decade,
we’d never really stopped to put all the pieces together, to take a holistic look
at all of our data. After any given study, we’d harvest the juiciest and most
exciting tidbits of information to share in publications and on our research
website, but we never really went back to do the slower, more methodical
drudgework of science: poring over some of the more mundane, but
nevertheless important, findings. We were so eager to think about future
studies that we never stopped to compare our current findings to the ones that
had come before.
In short, the pandemic gave us a sense of perspective and the opportunity
to sit down with our data and pore over it in a way we’d never done before.
We finally had a chance to look at more than 30 studies comprised of
thousands of questions given to tens of thousands of furries and, in doing so,
began to see the broader trends and patterns that only emerge from a holistic
look at a body of research.
That’s what this book is: it’s the most complete picture of all the research
we’ve compiled to date on the furry fandom. It’s our most holistic look at the
psychology of the furry fandom, the story with the most interconnected,
overlapping, interweaved narratives and subplots that we’ve written. We’re
using the whole buffalo, from head to toe, pulling together all of our findings
and looking at them not in isolation, but with an eye for seeing the big
picture that they all contribute to.
So, why bother doing this after a decade?
We’d be lying if we said it wasn’t at least a little self-serving. After all, a
decade is a long time for those irritating itches in the backs of our minds to
accumulate, that annoying sense of “I really should go back and take another
look at the data, just to make sure I haven’t missed anything” piling up with
each additional study. Getting to thoroughly comb through every piece of
data we’ve ever collected and organizing it has been a refreshing
3
experience—sort of like finally setting aside a Sunday afternoon to declutter
that messy closet or organize that junk drawer!
It’s also been a fantastic opportunity for us to reach out and seek the
perspective and expertise of those who are better studied on specifics than
ourselves. While we may be “experts” when it comes to furry, we are
generalists when it comes to many of the topics described in this book (e.g.,
race, sex, gender, the history of the fandom, political beliefs). As such, while
Furscience provided all of the data, experts have generously helped to
interpret and contextualize our findings within their respective fields,
providing important history or theoretical frameworks within which to
understand our findings. This is why we’ve opted for a more “edited
collection of chapters” approach to this book rather than a “the same authors
write every chapter” approach—it allows us to benefit from the years of
experience and expertise of other scholars!
A third reason for writing this book is to give back to the furries who
have given so much to us over the years. Our work at Furscience would be
impossible if not for the generous time of literally tens of thousands of
furries who’ve spent time completing our studies—not to mention the
countless others who’ve helped to signal boost our research, provide useful
critiques, and suggest new research topics and interpretations of our findings.
In fact, this was a big impetus for the book being self-published and released
for free digitally—because we truly feel that we’ve entered into a partnership
with the furry fandom, and so it’s only right and fair that every furry be able
to benefit maximally from this community effort.
The final purpose of this book is to be a one-stop shop for anyone who’s
curious about furries to learn more about the furry fandom and its denizens.
We’ve tried to balance the depth and breadth of our coverage to make this
book as relevant to newcomers to the fandom as it is to decades-long
aficionados; as useful to journalists and concerned parents as it is to
academics, and as accessible to laypersons as it is to furry lifestylers and
professionals. And while it might seem, on the face of it, a bit presumptuous
for us to assume that such a wide range of people would read our book and
get something from it, this is exactly what we’ve seen over the years from
our Furscience website: every week we receive e-mails from furries looking
to know more about the fandom they’re a part of, journalists writing stories
about furries and wanting to get the facts straight,2 parents wanting to better
understand their child’s new interest, and students and professors writing
2 This is a welcome change from the early 2000s, where much of the media
discourse on furries was based on unsubstantiated stereotypes and hearsay.
4
papers about the fandom. If nothing else, we hope that this book expands the
reach of our data and can help make it easier for people seeking to learn
more about the furry fandom to do so!
We’ve carefully curated and organized our findings into chapters in this
book in a way that both has a logical flow of ideas from chapter to chapter
(e.g., with facts building upon other facts) and allows readers who are only
interested in one specific subject to quickly and easily find what they’re
looking for. In this first part of the book, we start with the very basics, briefly
summarizing the story of how the furry fandom came to be, as well as the
story of where the Furscience team comes from and how we conducted the
research that we summarize throughout the rest of this book.
In Part Two, we look at concepts and behaviors that are fundamental to
the furry fandom. This includes defining what a furry is (or, rather, showing
how difficult it is to nail down a definition of what a furry is) and describing
what it means to identify as a furry. We also look at core behaviors that are
nearly universal in the furry fandom (i.e., creating a fursona, consuming and
creating content) or which, at the very least, are associated frequently enough
with the furry fandom that they warrant discussion (e.g., fursuits,
pornography). We also discuss important fandom-related concepts such as
the blurred lines between furries and other fandoms, the hodgepodge of
different subgroups within the furry fandom, as well as the presence of
drama and conflict in fandom spaces.
In Part Three, we take another approach to understanding furries, this
time looking at the people who comprise the furry fandom. This includes
looking at demographic features that are fairly distinct or that play an
important role in the character of the furry fandom (i.e., its fairly young age,
its predominantly LGBTQ+ composition, etc.). We also dedicate chapters to
giving voice to those whose presence in the fandom is often overlooked or
brushed over with the homogenization of the furry fandom, including
racialized individuals, transgender people, and women. We also provide
additional context for the chapter on drama and conflict by delving into the
religious and political beliefs of the furry fandom to see how an
understanding of furries’ fundamental values and principles helps us to better
understand why the fandom is the way that it is (e.g., progressive values).
In Part Four, we shift our focus to the psychological processes driving
furries and furry behaviors. We consider individual differences between
people and how they manifest in furry-specific behaviors and delve into the
question of what compels furries to be furries in the first place. We also
consider the role of animals in furries’ lives, including the distinction
5
between liking or being a fan of an animal and identifying as an animal, a
distinction commonly overlooked by laypersons outside the furry fandom.
Along these same lines, we also address a variety of misconceptions people
have about the furry fandom and how this contributes to stigma toward the
furry fandom, as well as the impact this stigma has on the well-being of
furries (and how the fandom provides a buffer against this stigma). We also
shine a spotlight on some very specific psychological concepts highlighted
by the furry fandom, including the significant prevalence of neurodiverse
furries and the role of furry in helping people navigate the increasingly
tumultuous pathway to adulthood.
We sincerely hope that, as you read, you’re instilled with the same
curiosity and passion to find out more about this weird and wonderful
fandom that we are!3 It’s that indescribable need to take very seriously this
subject which people so easily trivialize or dismiss out of hand as silly or
pointless. And, if nothing else, perhaps this book will help you to understand
why, when we’re so frequently asked “Why are you, a bunch of actual,
serious scientists, doing a study at a furry convention of all places?”, we
always give the same answer:
“For science!”4
3 Okay, it’s probably unlikely that most of our readers will feel compelled to
dedicate a decade of their life to scientifically studying furries the way we have—but
hey, if you are, drop us a line! We’re always looking for collaborators!
4 Yes, this is the actual reason why we are called Furscience.
6
7
Chapter 2
Furry 101: A (Brief) History of the Furry Fandom
Joe Strike
“Furry” is new; it’s also very, very old.
When I say “Furry is new,” I’m referring to what is generally known as
the “furry fandom.” This ever-expanding community of people who are
enthusiasts of anthropomorphic animal characters has only been around since
the closing decades of the 20th century.
But furries’ enthusiasm for imaginary beings who straddle the human and
non-human animal worlds goes way back. In fact, it predates civilization
itself!
Take for example the Lion-Man, or Löwenmensch, carved from a
mammoth tusk by an anonymous Ice Age sculptor some 40,000 years ago.
This twelve-and-a-quarter-inch tall sculpture depicts an upright figure with a
lion’s head on an essentially human body and is quite possibly the very first
piece of art ever created.
A teenager by comparison, the cave painting known as The Sorcerer dates
back a mere 140 centuries. Discovered beneath the French countryside, The
Sorcerer, like his older brother the Lion Man, is a therianthrope—a
combination of man and beast. Standing on human legs, a gently curving tail
adorns an otherwise human rump. His upper arms are pressed tightly against
his torso while his forearms, thrust straight out, end in paws. His head sports
antlers, tufted animal ears—and a pair of human eyes, round and looking
over his shoulder, as if startled.
One can ask whether Lion Man and The Sorcerer were intended to
represent half-human, half-animal deities, or were perhaps representations of
shamans or shapeshifters, beings at home in both the human and animal
worlds.
A clearer picture emerges in the better-known anthropomorphic gods of
Egypt, namely Anubis, the jackal-headed deity who judged whether a
deceased soul was worthy of entering the afterlife. His fellow gods included
the falcon-headed Horus, Sobek, the crocodile river god, the feline goddess
Bastet, and a veritable menagerie of others. Greek mythology is similarly
littered with half-goat satyrs, human/equine centaurs, and the bull-headed
minotaur. In India, the monkey god Hanuman and the benevolent elephant-
headed deity Ganesha are revered, while China’s legendary anthropomorphic
beings include Sun Wukong the Monkey King (a notorious trickster) and
8
Japan’s include shape-shifting and often passing-for-human kitsune foxes
and tanuki raccoon dogs.
In Indigenous cultures the world over, we can find countless examples of
rituals and ceremonies honoring specific animals—those who had
supernatural abilities or those from whom they descended. Native Americans
donned bison hides and performed the Buffalo Dance in hopes of a
successful hunt and they wore eagle feathers and danced in honor of the
sacred animal whose domain extended beyond the clouds. The shamans of
the Pacific Northwest Nootka tribes dressed in bear skins and bear masks to
“abduct” children in a ceremony bestowing adult privileges. Mesoamerican
and African tribes created and wore masks of animals and human/animal
hybrids for reasons ranging from religious ceremonies to intimidation of the
enemy during war.
This stands in stark contrast to modern society, in which we’ve lost some
of the intimate, direct, and even spiritual connection our ancestors had with
the non-human animal world. Our relationship with that world has become
mediated, denatured: cages and moats separate us from the beasts we gawk at
in zoos and nature preserves. Film and TV documentaries transform animals’
lives into narratives that we view safely from the comfort of our living rooms
and movie theaters. The animals we rely upon for sustenance are raised and
slaughtered in factory farms far from our squeamish eyes. For many of us,
the closest we come to a flicker of our primal connection to animals is
manifest through our domesticated companion animals, the dogs, cats, and
miscellaneous critters we occasionally choose to share our homes with.
While animals have always had a central role in the lives of humans, the
nature of that role has shifted over time. In earlier times, animals were
integral to humans’ spiritual and cultural lives, foundational to their systems
of meaning. Today, they have been reduced to mere commodities or
symbols: sports team mascots, corporate logos, advertisements1, and, most
presently relevant, cartoon characters whose antics we laughed at as children
over a bowl of cereal on Saturday mornings.
The roots of these cartoon critters predate modern animation and
television. Aesop (or the various ancient authors whose works are now
1 From 2009 through 2020 photo-realistic, CGI-animated hamsters promoted the Kia
Soul in a series of humorous TV commercials. A Kia executive remembers the
advertising team arriving in full-body hamster suits to present the campaign. In
2007, the French soft drink Orangina began an advertising campaign centered on
CGI-animated and quite attractive anthropomorphic animals; many of the
commercials had adult and even erotic undertones.
9
credited to him) gave animals human sapience and speech as a means to tell
moral tales that shed light on our human foibles and failings (the expression
“sour grapes”, for example, comes from the fable of the fox who decided the
out-of-reach grapes were sour and not worth the effort acquiring them.)
Other examples can be found throughout literature, such as The Canterbury
Tales, a 14th-century staple of college English Literature courses, and the
“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, a story about a vain rooster deceived by a wily
fox that would not be out of place as a Disney animated feature.2
Over time, fairy tales gave way to “funny animal” comic books starring
both recognizable, A-List Looney Tunes and Disney superstars and, even
more prominently, long-forgotten characters like Barney Rooster, Foxy
Fagan, and Dizzy Dog. These characters cavorted in silly, colorful stories
that (once you track them down online) would not be out of place today.
They were admired by plenty of fans who would grow up to continue to be
fans, including Ken Fletcher, an influential science fiction artist and a major
contributor to the early furry fandom:
“My parents bought Little Golden Books and things like that before I was
in kindergarten and read them to me. Funny animal comics too, like Bugs
Bunny and Uncle Scrooge, and secondary comics like [those with] Andy
Panda. When I was five or six, they gave me a subscription to Walt Disney’s
Comics and Stories. I started to read before kindergarten. I recognized my
first word in an Andy Panda comic: ‘BOOM’—a very distinctive, large
explosion filling a panel. Once the idea lit up in my brain, I was able to learn
reading by phonetics pretty quickly.”
Reed Waller, who worked with Fletcher and who similarly played an
influential role on the early furry fandom, had a similar story “My parents
read comics to me and [books] like Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer,
whatever they thought might interest me. They kept reading me comics
because I responded to them and seemed fascinated by the interaction of
story and art; good judgment on their part. Their intent was to raise
themselves a creative genius. They continued to read to me constantly, until I
was reading to them, and drawing comics of my own. As long as I [can]
remember, I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up.”
Ken and Reed’s paths crossed in the local Minneapolis sci-fi scene. “I’d
see him at least once a month or more,” remembers Ken, “hanging out in
people’s apartments. He seemed like just another guy in person, but we both
2 The studio spent years trying to adapt the story into a feature before abandoning the
project; instead, concept art for the film became the illustrations of a charming
children’s picture book, Chanticleer and the Fox.
10
had the ‘wiggle the eyebrows’ persona hidden away until we trusted other
people.
“I was impressed—he was just as weird or weirder [when it came to]
cartooning ideas as I was. He seemed to have more natural ability to do the
drawings than I did. We were certainly compatible in terms of what our
general interests were. And one of the things we discovered [was that] we
both liked animal comix—and enjoyed drawing them too.”
Ken and Reed realized they were kindred spirits who appreciated each
other’s work and shared a fondness for funny animal comics, classic Looney
Tunes, Fleischer animation, and underground comic artists like Robert
Crumb and Vaughn Bodē. “Soon,” Reed recalls, “Ken and I were regular
contributors of humorous art to science fiction fanzines around the world.”
Ken and Reed began to plan their own publication, one devoted to funny
animals; not a fanzine but an APA—an “Amateur Press Association”—that
only its contributors would receive.
“We dedicated ours to funny animal cartoons,” Reed explains, “because it
was the main bond between us. We were both sad that funny animals and
humorous comics, in general, had died a horrible death because of the new
‘seriousness’ of 1970s comics like Frank Miller’s ‘Dark Knight’ Batman—
we felt they were an endangered species. We were uninterested in swords
and sorcery or dark fantasy. We were cutting our teeth on Monty Python’s
Flying Circus, the Firesign Theater,3 and underground comix—anarchist
humor.”
“We were kind of aware that we weren’t alone,” recalls Ken, “that there
were people out there with the same interest in reconstructing, reusing funny
animal tropes from the 1930s and forties who felt themselves as isolated as
we did.”
Ken and Reed created a one-page flyer and a sample “issue zero”
promoting their planned APA. They distributed copies at the local comics
convention, made use of Ken’s contact list (“I’d been an active fan since
1968; at that point, I had accumulated eight years’ worth of addresses”), and
reached out to artists in fanzines and APAs doing funny animals (as well as
to others they guessed were funny-animal friendly.) “If they’re doing
science-fiction aliens but doing them funny-animal style, they’re probably
sympathetic; let’s send them an issue and see if they respond to it.”
3 The Firesign Theater was a troupe of four young L.A. comedians who created a
series of surreal countercultural and extremely funny LP comedy records in the style
of 1940’s radio dramas.
11
The sample issue’s cover, a joint effort by the pair, was inspired by the
final panel of a 1950s MAD magazine spoof of the era’s Today show.4 Their
cover depicts a chimpanzee, but their chimp was a parody of MAD’s parody.
Dressed in a Star Trek tunic, the chimpanzee mimicked Mr. Spock’s split-
fingered Vulcan salute. They also adopted the MAD chimp’s one word of
dialog—"Vootie”—as their APA’s title: Vootie. Its subtitle read “The APA
of Funny Animal Fandom,” while the Spock-chimp warned potential readers
“NO HUMANS ALLOWED!!” They gave their publication a tongue-in-
cheek political edge, declaring it “the official organ of the Funny Animal
Liberation Front.”
As Ken and Reed hoped, issue Zero had attracted a healthy roster of
funny animal fan artists. Shepherded by a series of editors, Vootie ran from
1976 through 1983, producing thirty-seven issues along the way.
Those thirty-seven issues were the first stirrings of what would eventually
evolve into the furry fandom.
A new, bigger and better APA was born from the ashes of Vootie. Just as
that publication appropriated a nonsensical word spoken by a comic book
chimp as its title, the new APA named itself Rowrbrazzle after a pseudo-
profanity often bellowed by Albert Alligator, the Pogo comic strip’s cigar-
chomping saurian. Amateur artists, writers, and enthusiasts network like
never before through the publication. Rowrbrazzle, which began as a funny-
animal-centric publication, gradually evolved into a furry-themed one and
attracted an assortment of fellow former Vootie contributors, high-profile
anthro fans, and, due to its being based in Los Angeles, animation
professionals like Jerry Beck (a founding member of the Cartoon Network
advisory board) and Chris Sanders (director of Lilo and Stitch). Even though
its distribution, like Vootie’s, was limited to its contributors, the publication
soon achieved legendary status within the furry fandom. Put simply: if you
were in ‘brazzle, you had it made—you were an art god.5 If you weren’t, you
4 From 1953 to 1957, a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs was Today’s on-camera
mascot. There was supposedly no love lost between host Dave Garroway and the
chimp; the Mad parody concludes with “J. Fred Gluggs” usurping “Dave
Garrowunway” as the show’s host and appropriating his palm-in-the-air “peace”
sign-off.
5 A waiting list of artists (including me) eager to join Rowrbrazzle soon
accumulated. I was finally accepted in 1990, when membership was increased from
fifty to sixty contributors. I never considered myself an “art god,” merely a mortal,
half-way decent cartoonist lucky enough to see his scribbles in print alongside the
work of vastly more talented artists.
12
wanted to see the work that was. In fact, members who were willing to let
other furs xerox pages of their copy suddenly acquired lots of friends.
If Vootie and its successor Rowrbrazzle laid the foundation for the furry
fandom, construction on its first floor began at the 1980 World Science
Fiction Convention in Boston, when funny-animal fans discovered a portrait
in the convention’s art show of a sci-fi character named Erma Felna. While
fans might have seen high-tech, hardware-heavy environments before in
space-themed anime, what they likely hadn’t seen was this sort of
environment inhabited by an anthropomorphic cat.
Vootie contributors and miscellaneous animation fans at the convention
were drawn to the painting—and to its creator, Steve Gallacci. They soon
discovered that the piece wasn’t a one-off: Steve had bought several other
paintings and a briefcase full of sketches and notes for an anthropomorphic
deep-space epic, something he’d been doodling for years. “For whatever
reason,” Steve later wrote in the third person, “his plopping in their midst as
an unknown with all that material in hand was some kind of gosh-wow.”
Steve invited the crowd to his hotel room to look over the art he had brought
and chat about their mutual interest in all things anthro. It was the first
meeting of what would come to be known as a “Gallacci Group.” For the
next several years, whenever a convention brought them together, a Gallacci
Group would spontaneously form. Almost all of those who attended were
artists who brought their sketchbooks along, brimming with their own animal
creations. They would talk about Erma, trade sketches, and share opinions on
their favorite sci-fi movies and cartoon characters. They would discuss their
own ideas for anthropomorphic epics late into the evening until Steve had to
toss them out to get some rest before the convention festivities resumed in
the morning.
When Rowrbrazzle launched in 1984, the artists gathered around Steve—
and Steve himself—were an immediate talent pool for the new APA. Thanks
to Rowrbrazzle, they didn’t have to wait until the next convention to interact
with one another; they could share their thoughts and opinions with everyone
at once, every three months, via the APA. That same year, Steve shared
Erma with the world at large via his newly published anthology comic
Albedo Anthropomorphics. As with Rowrbrazzle, Erma fans didn’t have to
wait until the next convention to catch up with her adventures.
With Rowrbrazzle, the Gallacci Groups would gradually come to an end,
although their creative energy and the momentum they had started would
continue to gather momentum.
* * *
13
Just off Trask Avenue in Garden Grove, California, there exists a large
ranch house that looks, more or less, like any of the other large ranch houses
lining the street. There is one difference, however: an enormous tree stump,
at least ten feet tall, stands in the middle of its front lawn. A sign affixed to it
depicts a weasel-like animal in a high-stepping Michigan J. Frog pose,
sporting a top hat and diamond-tipped cane, with a pair of antennae sprouting
from his head. He’s framed above and below by the words “PRANCING
SKILTAIRE.”
“Skiltaires are an alien species I created, based on Earth weasels and
other mustelids. They’re semi-biped, have a natural electro-generative
‘battery,’ electrostatic range sensing, and a kind of tele-empathy. I created
them in 1969 when I was in high school because I was tired of all the aliens
in science fiction that were just slightly different humans—and I happened to
really like weasels.”
The speaker is Mark Merlino who, together with his partner Rod O’Riley,
owns the house known as The Prancing Skiltaire, their home for more than
thirty years. Someday, there may be a historical marker attached to a tree
stump as well, an engraved brass plaque reading, “Home of Mark Merlino
and Rod O’Riley, creators of the Furry Fandom.” This may only be a slight
exaggeration. Furry has its origins at the junction of cartoon animals, anime,
and science-fiction content, and it was Mark and Rod who were at the center
of it all, and who ultimately named the result.
“I was a senior in high school when I met Mark,” Rod O’Riley recalls.
“Our science-fiction club went on a field trip to a sci-fi convention. I thought
conventions were all about costuming; this was the first one I’d been to that
had an art show. I was already a weasel fanatic when I saw Mark’s skiltaire
art in the show. When I met him, I asked why his otters had antennae. He
started explaining them to me, and when he mentioned he was running the
video room at the convention, I asked him if he had any Kimba6 episodes.”
Mark did indeed have Kimba episodes on hand. Rod then asked if the
same held true for The Amazing 3—a much more obscure series than the
widely distributed show about the white lion cub. “I think I have some,”
Mark replied.
It was the beginning, as the expression goes, of a beautiful friendship,
which eventually led to an ever-more beautiful partnership as Mark and Rob
became Furry’s number-one power couple.
6 Kimba the White Lion was an anime series based on a manga from the 1950s and
which some have suggested was a source of inspiration for Disney’s The Lion King
due to similarities between the two.
14
Mark held monthly screenings of cartoons from his extensive collection at
the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society’s clubhouse. Fred Patten, the editor
of Rowrbrazzle, a reviewer of furry books and anime films, an editor of furry
short story anthologies, and an animation historian, was a regular attendee.
Patton’s appreciation and participation in all things fannish went back
decades, when he cosplayed the Golden Age Flash at the 1962 Worldcon (his
costume was perfect, right down to the wings adorning Jay Garrick’s boots
and World War I helmet.) Fred described himself as “the biggest funny
animal fan around” who learned to read when he was four from newspaper
comic strips and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories.
Fred, Mark, and others organized the screenings into an animation fan
club. On Saturday, May 21, 1977, four days before the premiere of the
original Star Wars movie, the first official meeting of the Cartoon/Fantasy
Organization—the C/FO—was held with a program consisting entirely of
Kimba and giant-robot TV episodes, another anime specialty.
The C/FO screenings also attracted funny-animal fans, there for anime
series starring anthropomorphic characters like Kimba, The Amazing 3’s
Bonnie Bunny, and Fables of the Green Forest’s Johnny Woodchuck. Many
of the attendees hadn’t met each other previously; the C/FO screenings were
their first chance to network with other anime fans who also enjoyed anthro
characters—people destined to become some of the earliest members of furry
fandom.
At a 1985 “Westercon,” Mark and his partner, Rod O’Riley, decided it
was time to throw a funny-animal room party. They needed a name for the
event, something to put on the flyers publicizing it. It didn’t take them long
to decide the gathering would be a “Prancing Skiltaire” party, in honor of
Mark and Rod’s Garden Grove residence.
The event itself was a fairly low-key affair, with Mark screening videos
from his voluminous cartoon collection, including the funny-animal fan
favorite, Animalympics. New faces joined the regulars, people who had been
drawing or imagining their own anthros, but who never had a crowd to hang
out with before. They perused each other’s sketchbooks and traded opinions
on all things anthropomorphic between occasional glances at the Looney
Tunes episodes currently onscreen.
Building upon the success of the event, Mark and Rod hosted funny-
animal-themed parties at other conventions in the following months. They
attracted more fans, almost none of whom had expected to find others who
shared their distinct interest in anthropomorphic animals.
15
When it came time for the next Westercon, Mark and Rod decided to call
their party by a different name. They decided that the 1986 iteration of the
party would officially be known as a “furry party.”
They decided on the term “furry” instead of “funny animals” for a few
reasons, the most apparent of which was the fact that not all of the cartoons
were “funny,” with the case of Erma Felna being a prominent example.
Other adjectives had been floating around, including “fluffy” and “fuzzy”
among them. Mark credits a former Skiltaire resident and self-proclaimed
non-furry known as “Dr. Pepper” (no relation to the soft drink) for the
adjective furry.7 Mark and friends blanketed Westercon and subsequent
conventions with flyers featuring attractively drawn anthro characters
promoting furry parties. The fans who attended started calling both
themselves and their anthropomorphic characters “furries,” and their shared
interest was dubbed the “furry fandom.” From that point onward, the
adjective was indelibly cemented to the noun. As Rod O’Riley put it years
later, “We didn’t start [the] furry fandom, we just introduced it to itself.”
The premiere furry party was a success, and a tradition was born: Furry
parties (and the illustrated flyers promoting them) became a mainstream
tradition at science fiction conventions.
Encouraged by the growing attendance at these furry room parties, Mark,
Rod, and a few others organized a furries-only convention dubbed
“ConFurence” to be held in January 1989 in Costa Mesa, California, not far
from the Skiltaire. Its official title was “ConFurence Zero.” It wasn’t a real
convention so much as it was a dry run for an actual ConFurence they had
hoped to run a year later. Sixty-five furs from all over North America (and
one from Australia) showed up to mostly lounge around the lobby of the
Costa Mesa Holiday Inn. The program book (more of a pamphlet, really)
featured statements from Mark (“Some people criticize Furries as ‘wish-
fulfillment’ or a mask we wear to hide ourselves. My experience leads me to
believe the opposite is true. Your Furry is the face that lies behind the mask
[you] wear in everyday life”) and from Rod (“We are not, as it turns out, a
new fandom. We are an old, very basic fandom that has been waiting its turn
to proudly shout its name in public.”). Others contributed an assortment of
7 An Australian fur and an American one who are friends have each told me the
other first used “furry” in a 1983 fanzine. Thirty-plus years later, it seems less
important who said it first. Maybe Dr. Pepper had read that particular fanzine when
coming up with the adjective, or perhaps it was just a case of furry minds thinking
alike.
16
furry art to the pamphlet and even a tutorial on how to “Make Your Own
Tail.”
For those sixty-five furries, the lure was irresistible. What could be better
than a furry party that lasted the entire weekend? They would get their
answer one year later when, in 1990, the first “official” ConFurence attracted
130 furs. Year by year, the numbers kept rising as word spread: 250 for
ConFurence 2 in 1991, over 400 for ConFurence 3. By ConFurence 9 in
1998, attendance peaked at 1,250 furs—an increase of over 1800% over a
decade. The furry fandom had arrived—and it wasn’t going away.
* * *
Most people—including most furs—don’t realize that, despite the
attention given to fursuits as the most iconic and recognizable aspect of the
furry fandom today, furry was started by cartoonists and fans of funny
animals, animation, and anime. Fursuits came along later, once the fandom
was well-established.8
In fact, it was a bit of a surprise to cartoonists when fursuiters started
showing up in growing numbers at conventions, with some seeing them as
interlopers invading “our” art-centric fandom. In hindsight, it really
shouldn’t have been a surprise that fursuits became a popular form of anthro
self-expression. After all, costume contests and masquerades have been part
of sci-fi, comic, and anime conventions since their inception, and overlap
prominently with the LARP (live-action role play) and Renaissance Faire
communities. It would, if anything, be an anomaly to find that there weren’t
at least some fans of anthropomorphic characters who would be interested in
expressing themselves in the same way. However, the pendulum may have
arguably swung too far in the opposite direction, with many people
(including younger furs) believing that one has to own and wear a fursuit to
be considered a furry. To be sure, fursuits are now an established and
sizeable presence in the furry community, although they are hardly cheap
(see Chapter 8 for more on this).
In Furry’s early years, there were a handful of fursuit builders with the
skill to craft fursuits for those who were interested in them. Today, hundreds
of makers exist, offering all manner of customization options. The best of
8 One could argue that fursuits were present at the beginning of it all, even if they
weren’t a focal point. There was a single fursuiter at ConFurence Zero—a
professional Disneyland mascot performer who showed up not as one of Walt’s
creations, but as a “Bambioid,” a sexy outer-space deer partial to knee-high leather
boots!
17
these makers have waiting lists that are longer than a year, with some
holding auctions for a slot in their waiting list.
For those who can’t afford a suit, or for whom they prefer a more do-it-
yourself approach—there are countless tutorials, online resources, templates,
and tools available. It is easier than ever for novice builders to hone their
skills through practice and the sharing of knowledge in the community. In
fact, many professional makers got their start constructing their own suits,
only to become skilled enough to take on clients themselves.
* * *
Midwest FurFest and Anthrocon—America’s two largest furry
conventions—both grew out of (or outgrew) the mainstream science fiction
conventions that had originally hosted their “furry track” of anthro-themed
programming. Anthrocon—born in 1997 as “Albany Anthrocon”—gradually
pulled furry attendees away from Philcon, due to its exclusive focus on furry
content. Likewise, Midwest FurFest originated as the furry track at
Chicago’s Duckon convention.9
We can find an illustrative example of the variety of responses of the
general public to furry conventions by looking at these two conventions.
Midwest FurFest (or MFF as it’s known for short) has a larger attendance
than Anthrocon (due to its proximity to Chicago’s O’Hare airport, a
destination for direct flights from countries around the world). Nevertheless,
MFF’s presence goes largely unknown in the nearby metropolis.
In contrast, Anthrocon has been held in the heart of Pittsburgh at its
downtown convention center every year since 2006 and has been embraced
by the city in a way that furry has not been embraced by any other city in the
world; banners celebrating Anthrocon hang from the city’s lampposts, while
the local media give the furry convention glowing coverage. Parents bring
their kids downtown to take their photo posing with the fursuiters, while the
convention’s fursuit parade, which previously only looped through the
convention center, now makes its way outside the building to entertain the
thousand-plus Pittsburghers who wait hours to enjoy the magical sight of an
endless procession of fantastical animals marching by. In 2022, Anthrocon
and the city added a furry block party to the festivities, giving people the
opportunity to mingle with the fursuiters on the street fronting the convention
center.
* * *
9 Despite its name, Duckon, had nothing to do with ducks, anthropomorphic or
otherwise.
18
We started this chapter by pointing out that an interest in
anthropomorphic animals has been a fairly universal part of the human
condition for as long as the historical record has existed. Over time, humans
have gradually seemed to distance themselves from the natural world, and
have seemed to lose some of that connection to animals.
Furries, however, may represent a counterpoint to this broader trend, one
that, while starting in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, has spread to
become a global phenomenon. Furry conventions are now held worldwide,
including in Mexico, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hungary,
Belgium, Austria, Russia, The Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Australia,
Japan, China, and South Korea – to name just a few countries. Its global
appeal may represent a return, or at least a lingering sense of familiarity, of
that primal interest to understand ourselves and the world we inhabit by
blurring the divide between humans and those we inhabit this planet with.
19
Chapter 3
Furtuity: The Story of Furscience1
Kathleen Gerbasi, Courtney “Nuka” Plante,
Sharon Roberts, Stephen Reysen, Elizabeth Fein
Albert Bandura was one of the most influential psychologists of the
second half of the 20th century. In his work, he discussed the role of fortuity
and chance encounters in life, stating that “under certain conditions...
fortuitous events set in motion constellations of influences that alter the
course of lives” (Bandura, 1982, 1998, p. 95). Fortuity is one of those things
we only seem to recognize in hindsight, and it’s through this lens that we
reflect on the history of how our furry research team, Furscience, developed
and the role of “furtuity” in how we got here.
Dr. Gerbasi and Our First Study
In truth, the real credit for the origins of Furscience could well be given to
BoB the DoG. BoB was a gigantic, intensely social golden retriever who
greeted everyone he met with a big grin and a warm wag. BoB became part
of Dr. Gerbasi’s family largely through chance. He was the last of his litter
and an outcast because his size violated breed standards.2 Because of BoB’s
engaging personality, he and Dr. Gerbasi were invited to visit the local
nursing home throughout the 1990s so that BoB could share his joy with
everyone who wanted to meet him. BoB was ultimately recognized for his
service by being named Western New York Nursing Home Volunteer of the
Year!
But what, you may ask, does BoB have to do with furry research?
While Dr. Gerbasi has been a lifelong “dog” person3 and animal lover,
she had not followed the developing research on Animal Assisted Therapy or
any of its related phenomena (now broadly referred to as Animal Assisted
Interventions; Fine, 2010). Dr. Gerbasi did, however, become curious about
the state of scientific knowledge on the health benefits of associating with
non-human animals as a result of her work accompanying BoB as a nursing
1 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Penny L. Bernstein, without whose
support, interest, enthusiasm and Kent State (Stark) University’s institutional review
board, this furry research team would have never begun.
2 Because BoB was an enormous dog for his breed, he was readily recognizable. BoB
was a local celebrity, and Dr. Gerbasi thinks he could have probably been elected
mayor of the village where they took their walks, if only their official residence had
been within the village limits!
3 No offense to cats, it’s just that Dr. Gerbasi is very allergic to them!
20
home visitor.4 Eventually, she enrolled in an online course offered by
People-Animals-Nature (PAN) through DePaul University.
After taking the course, Dr. Gerbasi became interested in the field of
anthrozoology more broadly.5 As a social psychologist, she was already
focused on the scientific study of how humans think about, influence, and
relate to one another, and so, given her life-long interest in all species of
animals, it was only natural for her to be drawn to anthrozoology; it was easy
for her to imagine that relationships between humans and non-human
animals may share a number of similarities with relationships between
humans. Numerous studies show that to be the case, on subjects as varied as
attachment, abuse, empathy, and social support, to name just a few (e.g.,
Angantry, 2011; Arluke et al., 1999; Carlisle-Frank & Frank, 2006;
Greenebaum, 2004; Herzog, 2010; Julius et al., 2013; Topál et al., 1998).
As part of her growing interest in anthrozoology, Dr. Gerbasi led an
archival study on the immense growth of HAS from the 1980s through the
1990s (Gerbasi et al., 2002). She discovered that the number of HAS
dissertations had more than doubled in that time and that 27 different
academic disciplines had produced doctoral dissertations in HAS (e.g.,
psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, nursing, and
agriculture). She also observed that the study of HAS was a somewhat risky
business at the time, in that most HAS dissertations did not come from high-
prestige universities. Or, to put it another way, in high-status universities,
where young scholars face the plight of “publish or perish,” studying a newly
emerging field might be a career killer.
Because of her growing interest in anthrozoology and her 2002 article,
Dr. Ken Shapiro invited Dr. Gerbasi to become the moderator for an online
HAS discussion group sponsored by Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals (PsyETA), known today as the Animals and Society Institute
(http://www.animalsandsociety.org/main/). In her capacity as group
moderator, Dr. Gerbasi responded to requests for information that other list
members had left unanswered. It was in this context that Dr. Gerbasi had her
first fortuitous encounter with furries.
4 And later Dan and Sparky, two of her other canine family members who took turns
with BoB!
5 Anthrozoology is defined as the study of the relationships or interactions between
humans and other species of animals, also referred to as Human-Animal Studies
(HAS). And while the study of Animal Assisted Interventions (AAI) is a part of
anthrozoology, anthrozoology is a much broader field.
21
One day early in the 2000s, a request came through the HAS online group
asking if anyone knew anything about furries. Dr. Gerbasi waited a day or
two for someone to respond. Alas, no one did. Ever a dutiful scholar, Dr.
Gerbasi turned to a psychological database to see if there were any published
psychological articles on the subject of furries—something she knew nothing
about herself—only to find nothing.6 She followed her fruitless PsycINFO
search up with a more general Google search for information about furries.
The most popular response was an article on furries published in Vanity Fair
(Gurley, 2001). Unaccustomed as Dr. Gerbasi was to reading Vanity Fair,
she was pretty shocked by the claims being made about furries in the article,
which seemed to be based on very limited observations and interviews with a
small number of furries. As a social psychologist and now a budding
anthrozoologist, the study of furries represented the ultimate merging of her
two areas of academic interest—an exciting prospect!
At the time, Dr. Gerbasi was teaching at Niagara County Community
College, which is part of the State University of New York system. As a
fairly small, teaching-focused college, conducting research was not typically
part of the job description. As such, unbound by the “publish or perish”
mentality of bigger departments, she had the freedom to study whatever she
wanted as long as it didn’t impact her teaching and department
responsibilities. As luck would have it, Dr. Gerbasi was also teaching a
research methods class at around the same time she was “learning” about
furries from Vanity Fair. Her students were fascinated by the idea of learning
about furries and tried to find any peer-reviewed journal articles that might
explain what the Vanity Fair article was describing. Despite acquiring a
sizable stack of journal articles on fetishes,7 they concluded that these
articles had little to say about furries or the furry fandom specifically.
A few years later, another chance encounter —“an unintended meeting of
persons unfamiliar to each other” (Bandura, 1982, p. 748)—would find Dr.
Gerbasi. As she was sitting in an office, Justin Higner, a student of the
anthropology professor with whom Dr. Gerbasi shared an office, came
looking for the anthropologist, who happened to not be in. Justin had a large
6 Well, almost nothing—she did find an article on “the furry ceiling,” proposed by
Raupp (2002) to describe the rather limited reference to non-human animals in
clinical psychology. She was pretty sure, however, that this was not what the
inquirer was asking about.
7 Dr. Gerbasi dreaded the phone calls from her college’s interlibrary loan
department, which would usually start with, “Dr. Gerbasi, we have another fetish
article for you!”
22
art portfolio with him and asked if Dr. Gerbasi wanted to see his artwork.
Not wanting to be rude, she agreed and took a look.
Dr. Gerbasi nearly fell out of her chair at what she saw! It looked, to her,
like furry art. She asked Justin if that’s what it was, and he said yes,
confirming that he was, himself, a furry. Both were astonished—he, that Dr.
Gerbasi recognized furry art, and she, that she had finally met a real furry!
Dr. Gerbasi gently suggested that Justin might want to take her Psychology
of Human-Animal Relations course, sweetening the deal by letting him write
a paper about furries. He accepted and took the course in the fall of 2005.
And, as promised, he did get to write a paper about furries. Justin also asked
Dr. Gerbasi if she thought the college would send him to a furry convention.
When asked why he thought the college would send him to a furry
convention, he simply replied because he wanted to go to one. While Dr.
Gerbasi was absolutely certain that the college would not send him to a furry
convention, it gave her the idea to look into where the nearest furry
convention was. In another bout of fortuity, she discovered that Anthrocon
was relocating to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, less than a four-hour car ride
away from her college.
Of course, ethical guidelines dictate that one cannot simply show up at a
convention and start collecting data without permission to do so from the
convention itself. The chair of Anthrocon was Dr. Samuel Conway, known
in the furry fandom as Uncle Kage. Fortuity struck again, as Dr. Conway
was, himself, a research scientist (albeit a chemist, not a psychologist), and
understood the scientific method and the importance of data collection. He
also clearly understood how the media worked and was open to a scientific
perspective on furries to shed light on the more sensationalized approach to
furries that the media frequently took. Dr. Gerbasi explained to Dr. Conway
that she would let the data do the talking and that this would be one of the
first psychological studies of furries8—and would finally give psychologists
8 We should clarify here that this was one of the first empirical, psychological
studies of furries, but it was not the first, nor was it the only attempt to study furries
happening at around this time. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention David Rust’s
1998 survey of the furry fandom—a survey which, while not conducted through a
university or published in a peer-reviewed journal, nevertheless represents one of the
first attempts of furries to study their own fandom. It was followed up by a
replication not long after Dr. Gerbasi’s first Anthrocon study (Evans, 2008), as well
as with a large-scale general survey of the furry fandom by Alex Osaki (2008) and
with work by Rossmassler and Wen (2007). An in-depth compilation of scholarly
writing on the furry fandom is beyond the focus of this chapter, but has been
23
a peer-reviewed article about furries, rather than having to rely on outlets like
Vanity Fair.
Dr. Conway agreed to let the research team attend Anthrocon and attempt
to collect survey data, although he warned that almost no furries would want
to complete the survey. Ever an optimist, Dr. Gerbasi figured there was no
way to know if furries would take a survey unless someone tried! Dr.
Conway also mentioned that, on the off chance some furries did complete the
survey, there was no way to assess whether the participants constituted a
representative sample (see Chapter 4 for more on this). Dr. Gerbasi assured
him that, as a social psychologist, she was well aware of sampling issues and
how they can impact a study’s validity, and Dr. Conway seemed relieved to
hear that.9 Dr. Gerbasi was certain that she had cleared the most difficult
hurdle.
Boy, was she wrong.
Another significant hurdle was obtaining ethics approval to conduct the
study from an Institutional Review Board (IRB). In modern social science,
it’s essential to protect the well-being of one’s participants, something that
requires a review by an ethics committee. Unfortunately, Dr. Gerbasi’s small
community college didn’t have an IRB. When Dr. Gerbasi looked for a free-
standing, for-profit IRB, the price they quoted for a review was in the
ballpark of $25,000—completely out of the realm of possibility. She then
approached her biologist/anthrozoologist friend, Dr. Penny Bernstein, whose
specialty was human/cat relations. Fortuitously, Dr. Bernstein was interested
in collaborating on a study about furries, and her college, Kent State in
Canton, Ohio, did have an IRB. Hurdle number two was cleared!
Yet another challenge came from the fact that, despite being a half-day
drive from her college, Dr. Gerbasi was not going to be anywhere near
Pittsburgh when Anthrocon was being held in 2006; she would be at her
daughter’s Ph.D. graduation ceremony that weekend on the other side of the
country, at Stanford University. As such, Dr. Gerbasi needed a colleague
who was willing to travel to Pittsburgh, attend Anthrocon, and run the study
that Dr. Gerbasi had set in place. Enter Professor Laura Scaletta, another
psychology professor at Niagara County Community College. She was not
compiled by the furry scholar yerf on their website:
https://yerfology.wordpress.com/furry-in-academia/
9 Dr. Conway mentioned that, in his line of work, which involved molecules instead
of people, one never has to worry about molecules refusing to participate!
24
only up for the adventure, but helped design the survey and took several
student assistants to Anthrocon to collect the data.10
The survey itself was designed to test the assertions made by Gurley in
the Vanity Fair article, as well as to test whether there was a correlation
between being a furry and various psychological variables. Dr. Scaletta
hypothesized that if furries really believed they were not human or did not
want to be human, this might be an indicator of a personality disorder. Dr.
Gerbasi’s thinking at the time was that if furries did not think they were
human or if they wanted to be non-human, it seemed somewhat analogous to
Gender Identity Disorder (GID), as it was referred to at the time (American
Psychiatric Association, 2000), insofar as both seemed to involve feelings of
discomfort with one’s body.11 As such, the survey included indicators of
possible personality disorders, items adapted from a measure of GID, and
questions developed from the Vanity Fair article (e.g., furries have beards,
wear glasses, are gay men, work in fields involving computers, do not think
they are humans, and do not want to be humans.)
This first study (Gerbasi et al., 2008) illustrated one of the best things
about science: it was full of surprises! Perhaps the biggest surprise was the
fact that furries were willing to participate in our study at all. More than 200
furries—10% of Anthrocon’s attendance that year—participated in the study!
Another big surprise was the fact that, when it comes to measures of
personality disorder indicators, they were much more likely to be ascribed to
college students than they were to furries. Finally, the study showed that
there might be something to the idea that some furries—particularly those
who didn’t consider themselves to be 100% human and who wanted to be
0% human, were more likely to say that they didn’t feel entirely comfortable
in their own bodies.12
10 Among the assistants was, of course, Justin, the furry anthropology student from
Fall 2005!
11 We note that Dr. Gerbasi was working within the frameworks of the time. As we
point out in Chapter 20, we don’t pathologize people who feel like they are not
completely human, and we now know that people who do not identify as human are
actually therians or otherkin, not furries. Moreover, the comparison to GID was only
done to make a comparison to a condition that involved feelings of dysmorphia, or
discomfort with one’s own body, not to suggest that they had the same mechanisms
or were the same thing at all!
12 Of course, the study also found that most furries do not fall into this category, and
do see themselves as fully human and would not choose to become non-human!
25
In the following year, Dr. Gerbasi submitted a poster about the original
furry study to the Society for Research in Identity Formation (SRIF; Gerbasi,
Paolone et al., 2007) and also offered a panel discussion on the topic
(Gerbasi, Harris, & Jorgensen, 2007). She invited Dr. Conway to participate
as an expert, but he was unavailable on the scheduled date. Instead, Dr.
Conway put her in touch with some highly-regarded furries in the
Washington, DC area where the conference was being held. She met with
Karl Jorgensen and Brian Harris, who not only participated in the panel
discussion at SRIF, but they generously gave Dr. Gerbasi a ton of great
advice on how to get more people to participate at Anthrocon13 and
introduced her to the concepts of otherkin, therianthropy, and the therian
identity, topics which would become the eventual focus of her work in the
furry fandom.
At Anthrocon 2007, Dr. Gerbasi conducted a modified replication of the
first study. Not long after, she wrote what would become the first piece of
empirical psychological research on the furry fandom, Furries From A to Z,
(Gerbasi et al., 2008).14 By 2008, Dr. Gerbasi was running another study at
Anthrocon, this time including a measure of finger length ratios based on
prior research suggesting that it’s a proxy measure for testosterone and, by
extension, sex and sexual orientation (Putz, 2004). This would become
known as the great Xerox machine adventure, a valiant attempt to measure
furries’ finger digit ratios by photocopying so, so many hands and then
calculating finger length ratios from it.15 2008 was also the year that Dr.
Gerbasi began presenting a panel at Anthrocon, reviewing the findings from
13 One piece of advice was to give a prize for participating in the study. Since the
research had no source of external funding, this seemed infeasible. Karl and Brian
pointed out that it didn’t have to be: furries love having ribbons to put on their
convention badges, and ribbon is quite affordable! Dr. Gerbasi found the most eye-
catching multicolor paw print ribbon she could and, since then, it’s been a staple of
our research, a small token of appreciation to furries who complete our survey. It
also served to advertise the research project because it prompted other furries to ask
how they, too, could get a ribbon!
14 The article was published in the journal Society & Animals, for which Dr. Gerbasi
owes a great debt of gratitude to Dr. Ken Shapiro, the journal editor, for being open
to the publication of research about furries. While the topic of furries,
anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, and anthrozoomorphism clearly fit within the
parameters of a HAS publication, he was probably going out on a limb accepting an
article on such a novel topic!
15 Sadly, this methodology turned out to be too messy and imprecise, and yielded
nothing of interest.
26
previous years, discussing that year’s hypotheses, and seeking feedback and
ideas for future studies—the start of a tradition that we continue to this day.
It was during one of these sessions that a furry asked us about autism in
the furry fandom (see Chapter 23 for more on this). Following up on this
suggestion, in 2009 Dr. Gerbasi attempted to measure the characteristics of
people on the autism spectrum using a measure called the ASQ (Baron-
Cohen, 2001). This caused some problems with the Kent State IRB, as the
fact that we wanted to measure traits of autism suggested, to them, that we
were studying an “at-risk” population that needed special consideration.
Cutting it far closer than she would have liked, Dr. Gerbasi got IRB
permission the day before Anthrocon, and the study went off without a
hitch.16
Enter: Dr. Courtney “Nuka” Plante and Dr. Stephen Reysen
Another moment of monumental fortuity would occur not long after, in
2010. Dr. Gerbasi was asked to present her research at the very first Furnal
Equinox furry convention in Toronto, Canada.17 After completing her
presentation and chatting with the audience, one attendee said, “My friend
has to meet you, he wants to study furries too!” Dr. Gerbasi gave him a copy
of her 2008 furry article from her car to pass onto his friend and asked him to
have his friend contact her.
The friend in question was Dr. Courtney “Nuka” Plante who, at the time,
was not a doctor but, rather, a new graduate student in Social Psychology at
the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Like many young
graduate students, he was trying to figure a lot of things out about himself
and this new life he had chosen, which had taken him from his home in
Edmonton, Alberta, and across the country for his studies. One of the things
he was trying to figure out was what he should study for his thesis project, as
he felt directionless. He’d been told to focus on the things that most
interested him, but for him, that was playing video games and, as he’d only
16 Funnily enough, the results did not support the hypothesis that furries were
particularly represented on the Autism spectrum, at least as measured by the ASQ.
These findings would later be contradicted by much of our future research on the
subject years later.
17 The Canadian border crossing guard was initially suspicious when Dr. Gerbasi
said she was crossing to attend a furry convention. When asked to provide proof, Dr.
Gerbasi showed them a copy of Furries From A to Z that she happened to have in
the car. It was enough to convince them, and she was allowed to proceed.
27
recently discovered, furries.18 And while there were ample examples of
researchers studying video games, he didn’t know of any psychologists
studying furries.
That is, until Dr. Plante’s furry friend, Edolon, excitedly returned,
research paper in hand. He skeptically read the paper, half-expecting it to be
little more than an opinion piece or some unsubstantiated claims about
furries—as that was pretty much the only thing anyone had to say about
furries in popular media at the time. To his surprise, however, this seemed
like the “real deal,” and he quickly got in touch with Dr. Gerbasi.
This is how Dr. Plante and Dr. Gerbasi ended up working together at
Anthrocon 2010. They broadened the focus of the study, including measures
of dehumanization (a topic of interest for Dr. Plante at the time) and fanship
(see Chapter 6; Reysen & Branscombe, 2010), which was a topic of interest
for Dr. Gerbasi. To measure fanship, she used a scale developed by Dr.
Stephen Reysen, an up-and-coming expert in fan psychology. She contacted
Dr. Reysen for permission to use the scale in the relatively novel context of
furries, and he enthusiastically supported the idea. A few months later, he
contacted Dr. Gerbasi to let her know that there was a furry convention near
him in Texas called Texas Furry Fiesta and that he could put together a team
to study furries there. They agreed, and Dr. Plante tagged along with Dr.
Reysen to his first study at Texas Furry Fiesta, a tradition that could continue
for more than a decade afterward. Not long afterward, Dr. Plante proposed
dubbing the collaboration the International Anthropomorphic Research
Project (IARP),19 and the team ran their first large-scale online survey of
furries, their largest study to date, with more than 5,000 participants!
18 Dr. Plante had begun calling himself a furry as an undergraduate, where he met his
first furry friend, Ocean, who had helped him discover that there were others like
him. He eventually became part of the furry fandom and started going by his
fursona’s name, Nuka.
19 The name was somewhat out of necessity, to give their research project a bit more
credibility. To that point, whenever they were asked about their research, they had to
describe it as “research on furries”—a subject that wasn’t taken very seriously at all.
By calling themselves the IARP, they reframed their research as an international
collaboration between social scientists studying anthropomorphic phenomena
(really, just putting big words together to make it sound more complex than
“research on furries”)—it was enough to give it the air of credibility, even if it was a
mouthful to say!
28
Dr. Sharon E. Roberts
2011 would be a year just as filled with furtuity as 2009 and 2010 were!
Dr. Plante, still a graduate student, was saddled with one of the most soul-
draining tasks foisted upon graduate students: exam proctoring.20 At one
point, he found himself proctoring a final exam for Dr. Sharon Roberts, a
sociology professor. Being from different fields and working out of buildings
on the opposite side of campus from one another, the two had never crossed
paths. When Dr. Plante showed up before the exam, he was expecting to
make small talk with Dr. Roberts as a matter of politeness before settling into
the boring task.
It was during this idle chit-chat that Dr. Roberts asked him what he was
currently researching. While he was accustomed to hearing this question, the
truth was that he was working on a dozen different projects, most of which
were fairly mundane compared to his furry research. Normally, he would
describe one of the more mundane projects, if only to avoid a raised eyebrow
and skepticism about the validity of whatever they were doing in the social
psychology department. Maybe it was his exhaustion, or perhaps the sheer
boredom from a week of proctoring exams, but on that day Dr. Plante chose
to tell Dr. Roberts about his weirdest line of research, just to get a rise out of
her, especially if she had heard anything about furries in the popular.
Dr. Roberts had indeed heard of furries and was immediately very
excited. Her main source of information about furries was the infamous CSI
episode, Fur and Loathing (see Chapter 21 for more on this), but, rather than
weirding her out, it had only intrigued her as a researcher—she had always
been interested in studying furries, though she’d never had the opportunity.21
As a person who seizes upon an opportunity when it presents itself, Dr.
Roberts became the fourth co-founder of the IARP in the 15 minutes it took
to set up the exams in the room.
20 For the uninitiated, university final exams take place over approximately two
weeks at the end of a semester, seven days a week, from morning until late in the
evening. Each of these exams needs to be monitored not only by a professor, but by
additional proctors who patrol the room and monitor for cheating. To a graduate
student trying to pay for a trip home for Christmas, it means 30-40 hours spent
walking around eerily silent rooms full of terrified undergraduate students writing
exams. It’s about as exciting as it sounds.
21 In a distinct lack of furtuity, Dr. Roberts had presented some of her own research
at the biennial Society for Research on Identity Formation (SRIF) conference in
2001, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2015, and 2017. One of the only years she missed,
2007, was the year in which Dr. Gerbasi presented her furry research!
29
That fortuitous meeting completely shifted Dr. Roberts’ career trajectory,
as the furry research had done for everyone else on the team. From that point
forward, furries were an important focus for her data collection, publishing,
and funding pursuits. To her, the data spoke volumes about how the furry
community was unfairly maligned by much of the media. She directed her
energy towards evidence-based, anti-stigma efforts and saw an opportunity
to forge a win-win partnership with the furry community, conventions, and
the media that would be central to the success of the IARP’s research and
dissemination. To this end, Dr. Roberts forged a number of important
collaborations and sought out several key opportunities for the project—
reflecting something Dr. Plante once said of her: “If you send her off on her
own at a convention, she’ll come back with a new collaboration.”22 She was
the driving force behind the team getting a number of important research
grants, which has helped to fund much of our efforts.23
The Birth of Furscience
During 2013-2015, the IARP saw growing success as we published our
findings in numerous outlets (Gerbasi et al., 2015; Mock et al., 2013; Plante
et al., 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b; Reysen 2015a, 2015b, 2015c; Roberts et
al., 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). This was not an easy task, but the more we
published, the stronger our grant applications became. Likewise, the more
our work was funded by our institutions and government-led funding
agencies,24 the more we were able to conduct more ambitious projects and
publish that work in a wider range of outlets.
Despite this success, there was a feeling of discontent about the inability
of our work to make an impact on public discourse. Despite our ever-
growing body of peer-reviewed research—research that handily refuted the
stigmatizing sentiments put forth in sensationalistic media—we recognized
that we had a limited ability to hold court in the “attention economy” if all
22 From her own perspective, Dr. Roberts sees it as a matter of “the harder you work,
the luckier you get.” As an illustrative example, she knew that she wanted to study
trauma and resilience in the furry fandom, but also knew that her lack of
qualification would make it hard to do so. She solved that problem by getting a
Master of Social Work Degree in 2021—something she completed while
simultaneously working fulltime as a professor.
23 Tom Barber, who an awards officer at the University of Waterloo, was also a
tremendous help to the IARP as we secured larger and larger grants.
24 A big shoutout to Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (SSHRC) for helping to fund a significant portion of our
research!
30
we brought to the table was peer-reviewed scholarship in its original
format.25 Ultimately, publishing our work in scientific journals wasn’t
making a difference in the real world because it wasn’t getting into the hands
of the people who needed it the most. If we were going to make a difference
in reaching the public and injecting our research into the media narrative, we
had to go beyond traditional methods of disseminating and mobilizing our
findings.
One day, while Dr. Roberts and Dr. Plante were sitting together in Dr.
Roberts’ office, musing about how to get our research into the hands of more
people, this conversation happened:
Dr. R: “Maybe we could create some kind of public communication video
series with a YouTube station!”
Dr. P: “You mean a YouTube channel?”
Dr. R: “Yeah! It should have ‘furry’ in its name.”
Dr. P: “It should have ‘science’ in its name. Furries love science.
Whenever they walk past our table at a convention or we give them one of
our surveys they yell ‘For Science!!!’ at us.”
Dr. R: “It’s Furry Science.”
Dr. P: “It’s Furscience!”
In fact, in 2015, we documented these musings in a chapter written for
Furries Among Us:
“Despite evidence that they function well psychologically... furries
nevertheless perceive and experience significant stigma from the world
around them. Our one clinical paper is not going to change this reality
substantially… furries are regularly misrepresented in popular media as
sexual deviants, immature, or deserving of mockery… At this point, the
IARP is working on finding alternatives to the mainstream media. We
have begun the process of collecting and producing our own media
footage that tells the story rooted in science, not conjecture, prejudice, or
“informed” by screenwriters bent on sexing up a story to play on people’s
fears and distrust of the unknown or the different. We have several
projects on the go that we plan to release as we gain funds. One is Just
Like You* which is an anti-stigma outreach for anthropomorphic
communities. These will be original public service announcement
commercials designed to help the public become interested in learning
more about the furry fandom. The second project is Furscience—an
25 Say what you will about scientific reading, but it’s not exactly “light” reading, nor
is it easily accessible to the general public—most articles are unfortunately locked
behind paywalls put up by journals themselves.
31
original educational show designed to provide an accurate public
[friendly] account of the furry fandom. None currently exists. The raw
footage (furries’ Speaker’s Corner interviews), which is partially
collected, will be fused with existing data/research to produce a quirky,
factually accurate media outreach/education project… We hope that the
work that we do will continue to inform the public about furries…”
(Roberts et al., 2015c, pp. 166-168).
Looking back on the seeds of the Furscience vision—to insert our
research into the public domain—evokes many kinds of emotions. They were
big dreams with the odds stacked against us. We wanted to change minds
with information that opposed much of the public’s preconceived
misunderstanding of furries and their fandom. But our facts needed to be
more than just true—they needed to compete with the multimillion-dollar
visual spectacle and sensationalistic narratives. We also needed the media to
be able to find us—four researchers spread across a continent whose work
was largely published behind restrictive paywalls wasn’t going to cut it.
What we needed was some expertise that none of us possessed.26
Enter Malicious Beaver
Malicious Beaver, the furry moniker of our Creative and Communications
Director (CCD), has helped shape the launch of the IARP’s rebrand into
Furscience, which would be the public face for our team’s evidence
dissemination to furries, the non-furry public, scholars, and the media in
general. He’d been “beavering away” quietly behind the scenes of the IARP
since 2011, although he officially became our CCD in 2016 with the goal of
helping us communicate our findings to the public and beyond, and to go
where furries often didn’t want to go—directly to the media. However, he
recognized the need to do so on our terms—armed with facts presented in a
compelling way that was easy to understand.
With more than a decade of experience in marketing, communications, art
direction, brand and concept development, Malicious Beaver helped
Furscience reach broader and more diverse audiences, not just by putting our
facts against the internet’s (or whoever’s) fiction of what a furry is, but by
showcasing and packaging our facts in a way that makes the truth about
26 It’s rather unfortunate that many researchers in general, including several on our
own team, are so bad at self-promotion. Perhaps it’s because of the imposter effect,
the tendency for experts to feel inadequate or to underestimate their competence
because of a growing awareness of how much they don’t know (Bravata et al.,
2020), but it would be nice if experts could sometimes speak with at least some of
the volume that uninformed pundits do.
32
furries more interesting and worth writing about. Beaver was able to
articulate a brand and communications strategy that distilled our foundational
peer-reviewed data into messages that the mainstream media could more
easily understand, find compelling, and which would make accurately
writing about furries easier and more eye-catching than rehashing the same
old, overused, fictionalized, and sensationalized stereotypes. His overall
brand strategy for Furscience has been to present complex concepts without
sacrificing accuracy, making them visually and rhetorically compelling to
compete with less substantive, clickbait headlines. Our Furscience brand is
more than just a logo: it’s a visual identity purpose-driven to convey both the
seriousness of the science surrounding furries and how fun furries can be.
New Areas of Research and New Additions to the Team
For years we were in dire need of a clinical psychologist on our team,
given the numerous areas of research we wanted to study (e.g., autism,
mental health) but fell outside our team’s general area of expertise (i.e.,
social psychology, anthrozoology, sociology). Once again, fortuity struck!
Ideally, we were looking for a fairly new Ph.D. faculty member who had yet
to fully establish a research program—as was the case with Dr. Plante, Dr.
Reysen, and Dr. Roberts when they joined the team. To this end, Dr. Gerbasi
scoured the faculty pages of psychology departments in and around
Pittsburgh, given that Pittsburgh is where our team conducted its largest
annual convention study—meaning it would be less of an ask for a new
faculty member to travel to Anthrocon to do research with us. To Dr.
Gerbasi’s amazement, she found Dr. Elizabeth Fein, a new assistant
professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She was a clinical
psychologist with a background in Anthropology (which was also on our
wish list) whose doctoral dissertation involved work with adolescents on the
autism spectrum. When Dr. Gerbasi reached out to her, she was enthusiastic
about the work and agreed to come aboard the team.
As a clinical psychologist and anthropologist, Elizabeth had long been
interested in the power of roleplay, myth, and creative subcultures to help
people transform themselves and their lives. Having come of age as a young
adult in the goth scene, she knew that close-knit communities could be built
around aesthetic and symbolic systems. In her dissertation research with
youth on the autism spectrum, some of which took place at a summer camp
for live-action role-players (LARPers), she’d learned how transformative it
can be to join together with others through shared imaginative mythologies,
to re-imagine oneself and the possibilities of one’s world. (For more on this
work, you can check out her book, Living on the Spectrum: Autism and
33
Youth in Community.) When she was approached by Dr. Gerbasi about
joining a research team studying furries—a group who, themselves, engaged
in shared imaginative experiences, created alternative identities, and had a
significantly higher proportion of people on the autism spectrum (see
Chapter 23)—it was a tremendous opportunity for her to continue her work.
Dr. Fein went to Anthrocon for the first time in 2016, where she was
entranced by the furries (and even more by therians and otherkin!) who sat
with her for hours on the floor of the convention center, human bodies
awkwardly folded into whatever quiet corners they could find, taking the
time to tell her their life stories. The Furscience research team had already
built up a great deal of trust with the community, which made it easier for
her to earn their trust and be greeted with the gentle playfulness that
characterizes much of the furry fandom.
Since that first year, Dr. Fein has worked alongside many graduate
students from the Duquesne Ph.D. program (Ben Gaddes, José Luiggi-
Hernandez, Gaby Mena-Ibarra, and Jennifer Bradley), she’s interviewed
dozens of furries on the autism spectrum and their families and friends, and
has held numerous focus groups on autism at Anthrocon. She’s also been
working alongside Dr. Gerbasi on better understanding therians and otherkin,
as well as with her neuroscientist colleague, Alex Kranjec, and his team of
graduate students (Erick Guzman, Lou Lammana, and John Dall’Aglio) to
see if furries, therians, and otherkin respond differently to a “bodily illusion”
involving a rubber hand. Most recently, she’s been conducting online
surveys to better understand the experiences of therians and otherkin who
may not make it out to furry conventions, but who, nevertheless, have a lot to
say about their experiences.
Conclusion
Albert Bandura was really onto something when he talked about the
importance of fortuity in our lives. The book you’re holding27 is a testament
to that fact—it’s the culmination of the many fortuitous happenings, large
and small, that changed the trajectory of each member of the Furscience
team. It’s every chance conversation, small coincidence, split-second
decision, and opportunity that presented itself over the past decade and
allowed us to forge our myriad interests into a harmonious collaboration.
This chapter didn’t need to be in this book. We could have easily
excluded it and jumped straight into talking about our methodology and the
countless studies and results we’ve obtained over more than a decade of
27 Or, more likely these days, looking at on a screen!
34
studying furries. However, we’re frequently approached by furries and
scholars alike who’ve seen what we’ve been able to do at Furscience and
exclaim that they could never do what we do. We want our story to inspire
others to see that the Furscience team is, at the end of the day, just a group of
curious people whose passions and curiosity have led us to find like-minded
others who share that interest. Importantly, when each of us started along this
shared journey, taking the plunge and capitalizing on those fortuitous
moments that presented themselves, we had no idea where it would lead us.
Dr. Gerbasi had no idea, when she agreed to be a forum moderator, that it
would lead to her trailblazing work doing studies at furry conventions. Dr.
Plante had no idea when he decided to e-mail a person he hadn’t met after
reading her paper, that it would lead to a decade-long collaboration. Dr.
Reysen had no idea when he agreed to let his scale be used by a researcher
he’d never heard of before, that it would lead to his noticing a nearby furry
convention only months later and lead to dozens of research papers and book
chapters. Dr. Roberts didn’t know, when she chose to make small talk with
her exam proctor, that his answer would launch her into a research and
activism-filled career. And Dr. Fein didn’t know when she was completing
her dissertation work on LARPers, that she would eventually springboard
from that into studying furries, of all things!
If nothing else, we hope this story inspires others to be bold and pursue
their interests, even if it’s not clear at all where they may take you. For us,
our mutual interest has led to science-based advocacy and knowledge
mobilization efforts, helping furries to learn more about their fandom, and
scholars and the media alike to better understand this commonly
misunderstood group. This shared goal has compelled us to make our work
visible and to use the tools of social marketing, community, and media
partnerships to be educational partners for the furry community.
And while none of us could have expected where the work would
eventually take us, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t surprised by the
impact our work has had! While we’ll never be able to single-handedly
change public discourse, competing, as we are, with multi-billion dollar
corporations, we have had measurable success in disseminating our findings
to the public, who can now find our work simply by doing a Google search
using common keywords (e.g., furries, what are furries).28 We’re also proud
to have been the fact-checking source for countless media articles, correcting
the record when it comes to everything from the belief that furries are people
28 More often than not, Furscience pops up in the top five results! This isn’t an
accident or coincidence, as Malicious Beaver can tell you!
35
who wear fursuits and believe that they’re animals to rumors about furries
using litterboxes in school during the 2022 US election cycle (e.g., New York
Times, NBC News, Reuters, Snopes, Politifact, Guardian, Daily Beast, New
York Post).
So take a page out of Bandura’s book and be on the lookout for the little
opportunities that present themselves to you. You never know how a small
conversation, a quick e-mail, going to an event, or putting yourself out might
change your life—or the lives of those around you—for the better!
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Interaction with Anthropomorphic Phenomenon: Notes for health
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https://yerfology.wordpress.com/furry-in-academia/
39
Chapter 4
A (Not Too Painful) Introduction to Research Methods
Courtney “Nuka” Plante
If you’re getting ready to read this whole book, we should probably warn
you: you’re about to get hit with a lot of data. Like, a lot. More than a decade
of studies and tens of thousands of participants worth of data. To put that into
perspective: if you were to multiply each of those thousands of participants
by the (on average) two hundred or so questions in a given study, we’re
talking 5-10 million points of data.
It’s a lot to take in at once, and it can be a bit intimidating to try and make
sense of, especially if you’re not accustomed to poring over scientific
research. Don’t worry if you feel that way—that’s half the reason why we’ve
included this chapter in the book! It’s a chance to get your feet wet with
some of the basics when it comes to data collection, analysis, and
interpretation, sort of like easing you into the pool instead of throwing you
head-first into the deep end and watching you flail around.
But, as we’ve said, that’s only half the reason we’ve included this
chapter!
The other reason we’ve included this chapter is to help our readers
become informed skeptics. Of course, you can be skeptical about anything
without too much effort. I could choose, for example, to simply disbelieve
everything I’ve ever been told about gravity, insisting that any tendency for
me to be drawn toward the ground is a coincidence or the result of my
willing this to be the case. I imagine you’d feel pretty comfortable dismissing
my skepticism as contrarianism or plain old ignorance, but could you
precisely explain why I was wrong? If I were to argue that you couldn’t
prove gravity was a universal force because you couldn’t observe everything
everywhere in the universe—wouldn’t there be a kernel of truth embedded in
my statement? Or what if I claimed that I had a no-gravity experience one
time when you weren’t looking—isn’t it possible? And sure, maybe I
recently had my heart broken by a physicist and am being paid by an
organization that profits when people believe that gravity isn’t real—but can
you prove that this is what’s causing my skepticism?
As it turns out, not all skepticism is equal, nor should all skepticism be
extended unlimited charitability. Sometimes skepticism is dishonest, done in
bad faith by someone who’s motivated by something other than arriving at
truth. Other times, skepticism is ill-informed, grounded in falsehoods and
misinformation. At the end of the day, there’s little we can do in this book to
40
stymie the first type of skepticism: if someone’s reading this book with the
goal of misquoting, misrepresenting, and selectively focusing only on data
that fits their pre-existing beliefs about furries while ignoring or challenging
anything to the contrary, we can’t stop them.1 Instead, this chapter aims to
address the second type of skeptic, the one who, despite having the best of
intentions, simply lacks the skills and knowledge to be an informed, critical
consumer of research. We believe that a little knowledge can go a long way
toward helping these folks, and we want to give them the tools to become
skilled consumers of science.
In full disclosure, our intent isn’t entirely altruistic. That is to say, we do
have an ulterior motive for wanting to instill some scientific literacy in our
readers: it’s to help us do better science. Indeed, many of our best ideas have
come from those who critique our methods, challenge our findings, and
suggest new approaches to avoid our shortcomings.2 We wouldn’t be
scientists if we didn’t enjoy nerding out about ways to improve our methods,
analyses, and conclusions! But skepticism and criticism are only helpful if
they’re informed. Imagine, for example, telling a video game designer that
their video game sucks. The designer, obviously, has a vested interest in
wanting to improve their video game, and so they press you for details: what
was bad about it? Was it the pacing? The writing? Was the core gameplay
loop uninteresting or lacking in interesting variety? Did it rely too much on
random chance, depriving players of the chance to influence the outcome?
Was the difficulty curve too steep?
“No, it just, y’know, sucked.”
Unfortunately, criticism of this sort is painfully common, and we’ve
witnessed plenty of it over the years from skeptics whose criticisms or
outright dismissals of our work hinged on misunderstanding basic scientific
principles. This is why we’d like to help readers learn to form better, more
precise arguments for their skepticism and to better discern which of their
criticisms are valid and which are relatively trivial. As we’ll discuss at the
end of this chapter, a bit of scientific literacy can help us avoid throwing
babies out with the proverbial bathwater and prevent the sort of all-or-
nothing, black-or-white thinking that characterizes criticism of scientific
research from those who don’t do research themselves.
1 Indeed, the author of this chapter has seen more than his fair share of this sort of
“motivated reasoning” from people “just asking questions,” both when it comes to
his research on furries and when it comes to his research on the especially hot-button
topic of media violence!
2 And believe me, there are always ways we could have done a study better!
41
And hey, if nothing else, this chapter will teach you a few concepts and
fancy words so you can flex your critical thinking at the next dinner party!3
Thinking Like a Scientist
As the name of this book suggests, we’ve taken a scientific approach to
the understanding of furries and the furry fandom. But what, exactly, does
this mean? What makes an approach scientific, and what makes this
approach different from other means of knowledge acquisition (e.g., trusting
one’s gut feeling, relying on word-of-mouth, or learning about something
from the media)?
To start, take a moment and think about what comes to your mind when
you picture science. Chances are, you’re probably picturing people wearing
white lab coats in a laboratory. Maybe they’re using microscopes or
transferring colorful liquid from one test tube to another using a pipette.
Perhaps you’re imagining a data scientist staring at a sea of numbers on a
monitor or a neuroscientist pondering a scan of a brain.
Images like these often focus on the superficial trappings of science; that
is, they focus on specific scientific fields (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology)
and the tools those fields employ (e.g., computers, scanning devices, fancy
beakers). But just because you’re using these devices, that doesn’t mean that
what you’re doing is science. For example, a chef can don a white coat and
mix up a sauce in customized glassware using fancy tools to achieve precise
measurements. Would we consider the chef to be doing science?4
Conversely, you can do science without fancy tools, with little more than a
pencil and paper; asking a group of people to fill out and return a survey to
test a hypothesis can be science. It might not involve million-dollar machines
or a laboratory, but gathering data to test hypotheses is the backbone of
science!
At its core, science is a very particular way of acquiring knowledge. Of
course, there are lots of ways you’ve learned the things you have: by
listening to what your parents have told you, by watching television or
reading a newspaper, by interpreting moral lessons in stories, and even by
intuition and a gut feeling. Each of these ways of knowing has its respective
strengths and weaknesses—some are fairly quick and easy to do, but can’t
3 It’s also worth noting that the concepts we’re teaching you in this chapter apply to
far more than just our research on furries. Scientific literacy skills can be applied
when reading scientific research from almost any scientific field!
4 To be sure, scientifically-derived principles are at play in cooking and baking,
including chemistry and physics. But the act of baking is not, itself, doing science,
for reasons we soon shall see!
42
always be counted on. Some are riddled with bias, but have the benefit of
being fairly commonly agreed upon by others in society.
Science is really just another way of acquiring knowledge, albeit one that
involves a very specific way of thinking.5 We can characterize scientific
thinking as having at least five different facets:6
1. Forming models and theories based on empirical observation and prior
research.
2. Systematic, unbiased observation to test hypotheses.
3. A willingness to rigorously re-test the consistency of one’s findings.
4. An open-minded willingness to be wrong and to actively seek
falsification.
5. Nuanced, multivariate, probabilistic thinking.
Scientists Form Theories and Models
Let’s start with the first point: scientists observe the world around them
and read the existing literature to be aware of what others have found. They
then try to integrate all of this available information into a model or
framework that consistently explains how some facet of the world works.
These models may vary in scale and complexity, from models of the
structure of atoms to models of human motivation to models of entire
cultures and economic systems. What they all have in common, however, is
that they are all grounded in empirical reality; scientists make observations
themselves or note the findings of other scientists and develop models
consistent with these observations that also make predictions about what
scientists can expect to find in the future.
Predictions are a critical part of scientific thinking. Good scientific
theories not only explain the world, but they also make predictions about it.
A model that explains everything, but predicts nothing, is practically useless.
As an illustrative example, let’s imagine I was watching customers walk in
and out of a pet store. One by one, I observe customers walking into the store
and, one by one, they walk out of the store with either a cat or a dog. After a
few dozen customers, I might propose a model to explain which customers
walk out with cats and which walk out with dogs. Perhaps I suggest that
when customers walk into the store, they pass through an invisible energy
field that puts the idea into their head to get a cat or a dog. As such, the
5 Note that science is a process, not merely a heap of facts. Some facts may be
derived through the scientific process, but a textbook full of scientifically-derived
facts is not, in and of itself, science; it is the output or consequence of doing science!
6 This is far from a complete list, but it represents some of the most important
characteristics of scientific thinking.
43
people who walked out with cats passed through this unseen barrier, had
“cat” put into their mind, and got cats, while those who got dogs passed
through the same unseen barrier, which put “dog” into their mind, and they
got a dog instead.
A strength of my model is that it perfectly explains 100% of my
observations: to this point, I have observed nothing in the behavior of
customers that contradicts my model. Despite this, for all intents and
purposes, my model is entirely useless. Why? Because my model can’t help
me predict whether or not the next customer who walks into the store will
walk out with a cat or a dog. I can’t see this barrier for myself, nor do I know
how or why this barrier influences people. In other words, my model makes
me no better at predicting the pet-purchasing behavior of the next customer
than someone just flipping a coin that says “cat” on one side and “dog” on
the other side.
In short, if a scientific model can’t predict anything about the world, then
it contributes nothing to our knowledge of the world.7
Now let’s consider what a scientific model might look like in the same
situation. Imagine if, as people were going into the pet shop, I gave them a
quick personality test to measure their level of extraversion. After a few
dozen customers, I begin to notice a pattern: those who scored higher on the
extraversion scale walked out of the store with a dog, while those who scored
lower on the scale walked out with a cat. From here, I devise a model that
proposes that extroverts tend to like dogs, whose personalities tend to be
more outgoing, while introverts prefer cats, whose personalities tend to be
more independent and less attention-seeking. Unlike my invisible energy
field model, however, I can now make predictions about the behavior of
future customers based on this model. I can give a customer my personality
test before they walk into the store and, based on the results of that test, I can
make an informed guess about whether they are more likely to walk out of
the store with a dog or a cat. And, if there’s any truth to this new model, it
should outperform the energy field model and the person flipping a coin
when it comes to accurately guessing whether the customer will walk out of
the store with a dog or a cat.
Scientists Test Hypotheses
Science isn’t just about forming models, it’s about testing them.8 Part of
the craft of science is in devising practical ways to gather information in a
7 Case in point: I could easily replace the invisible energy field with pixie dust and it
would be just as informative. The interchangeability of these models shows us how
untethered to reality they are.
44
systematic and unbiased manner. Systematic, in this case, means gathering
data in a planned and controlled fashion, and designing a study to maximize
its ability to effectively test our hypotheses. For example, we may run our
pet-purchasing study at different pet stores in different parts of the country to
test whether our findings are consistent across the country or are limited to
the customers at one store. It also involves trying to control for external
factors to ensure that nothing influences the results of the study (e.g., the pet
shop having a “free cat” day while you try to collect data, which might
incentivize people to choose cats over dogs regardless of their personality).
A good scientist will also be motivated to be unbiased in the way they
collect, analyze, and interpret data. After all, the only way to be certain of
one’s model is to expose it to cold, hard reality to see whether it sinks or
swims. If the researcher gave customers the personality test and then
followed the extrovert into the store to convince them to buy a dog, then it
would be impossible to know whether dog-buying behavior was driven by
extraversion or by being hounded9 by a scientist in the store. In this case, the
scientist’s influence might help them find data consistent with their model,
but these sorts of biases end up producing models that don’t hold up to
scrutiny and which, over time, are replaced by models that better reflect
reality (e.g., accurately predict the behavior of customers who aren’t
harassed by scientists in a pet shop). For this reason, scientific thinking
necessitates systematic and unbiased data gathering.10
Scientists Test and Retest
Being a good scientist means being difficult to please; it’s not enough to
find evidence that supports your model once. Scientists are an incredibly
skeptical bunch, always worried that a finding may have been a fluke.
Returning to our pet store example, if I were to determine that a single
8 We’re focusing primarily on experimental studies in our examples, but these same
principles can also apply to the gathering of open-ended, exploratory data as well,
something we’ll discuss later in this chapter! For now, we’ll say that researchers who
specialize in gathering open-ended, qualitative data (e.g., case studies, long-form
interviews) often do so to form models that are later tested by quantitative
researchers. They are similarly hurt by being non-systematic or biased in their
approach to data collection.
9 Pun definitely intended.
10 We’re talking about scientific thinking as an ideal here. In practice, scientists have
biases that may cloud their deliberate or inadvertent judgment. This is one of the
reasons why the peer-review process is so important, a point we bring up later. For
now, we’d just like to point out that science in practice may not always live up to the
ideal of science.
45
customer was an extrovert and then watch them walk out of the store with a
dog, I might conclude that my model is correct. However, it is entirely
possible that the next customer to walk into the store may be an extrovert
and, nevertheless, choose a cat, something that would go against the
prediction of my model. For this reason, it would be in my best interest to sit
by the door of the pet store for a while, subjecting my model to test after test,
customer after customer, to see how consistent it is.
But a diligent scientist won’t stop there. After all, who can say that the
results weren’t simply a quirk of this particular pet store? With this in mind, I
might set up tests of my model at every pet store in town. If, after running all
these tests, the evidence still points in favor of my model being correct, then
I can be reasonably sure it probably wasn’t a fluke, and that my model
accurately predicts pet-buying behavior in most people in most places.
But why stop there? An especially diligent researcher would consider the
possibility that they, themselves, might be biasing the results—after all,
they’re the ones with a model to test. As such, they might ask other
researchers in the field to run the study themselves, at their pet stores, to see
whether the model holds up even when tested by other researchers. They
might even go one step further, testing how well the model holds up over
time. Perhaps they might run another test of the model at pet stores 20 years
later to see whether the model still predicts pet-purchasing behavior or
whether the model’s usefulness was limited to one particular point in time or
for one specific generation.11
Scientists are Willing to be Wrong
Building upon our previous point, scientific thinking requires openly
embracing the likelihood that one might be incorrect. If a scientist doesn’t
seriously consider the possibility that their model could be wrong, it becomes
impossible to truly test their model. For example, if I were convinced that my
model of pet-purchasing behavior was correct and refused to believe that it
might be wrong, I might find excuses to conveniently disregard evidence
suggesting that my theory is wrong. If I saw an extrovert walk out of a pet
store with a cat instead of a dog, in opposition to my model, I might dismiss
11 This is why scientists often balk at the idea that a scientific model or theory is
“just a theory,” implying that it has little to no predictive power or that it hasn’t been
held up to intense empirical scrutiny. In lay conversation, we often use the terms
“theory” or “model” to suggest baseless suppositions or crude approximations. In
reality, the most renowned scientific theories and models are subjected to a degree of
scrutiny and testing that would stagger (and probably bore to tears) anyone who
doesn’t have an especially keen interest in the subject.
46
the observation by saying “Well, clearly that person is an introvert, they must
have filled out the survey incorrectly!” In doing so, I could protect my model
from any evidence suggesting that it’s incorrect, no matter how much that
evidence piles up!12
This principle of skepticism and a willingness to be wrong is so
fundamental to scientific thinking that we build it into scientific practice by
default. For example, scientists design studies and test hypotheses around the
assumption that their model is, in fact, incorrect. They are trained to interpret
the results of a study as showing no support for their model unless the data
show quite conclusively otherwise (e.g., less than a 5% chance of being
wrong). In other words, if the data from a study were to come out such that
there was a 50/50 chance that the model was either right or wrong, scientists
would err on the side of skepticism and treat this as evidence that the model
is incorrect. Even if the data came out with 90/10 odds in favor of the model
being correct, scientists will still treat this as evidence that the model is
wrong, as a 10% chance of being incorrect is still considered too large to be
acceptable.13
And the skepticism doesn’t end there! We’ve acknowledged that
scientists may be biased and have some incentive to find support for their
models. To account for this, scientists have built a self-correcting mechanism
into the publishing process called “peer review.” In a nutshell, highly-
credited, prestigious outlets for scientific research require that any piece of
research wanting to be published must first be scrutinized by other experts in
the field. This scrutiny includes subjecting the study to questions about its
methodology and analysis,14 requests for additional studies, and challenging
the study’s conclusions with alternative explanations. The intended result of
this process is for low-quality, biased, or dubious findings to be filtered out,
leaving behind only the strongest studies that hold up to scrutiny from the top
12 Scientists are often pressured to find support for their models by the allure of
prestigious awards or, as is unfortunately common, the threat of losing their jobs if
they don’t contribute sufficiently to their field. These pressures can undermine a
scientist’s impartiality and hurt the pursuit of science.
13 This is, of course, an oversimplification of how hypothesis-testing works in
practice, but it’s good enough for our purpose, since we assume most readers don’t
want to delve into the finer points of null hypothesis statistical tests and Bayesian
estimation.
14 And, in recent years, scientists are even required to make their data available so
that other scientists can analyze it themselves and look for irregularities or evidence
of tampering.
47
minds in the field. While the peer-review process is often grueling,
intimidating, and far from perfect, it represents a level of self-criticism that
one rarely finds with other ways of gathering knowledge.15
Scientists Recognize the Complexity of the World
A final characteristic of scientific thinking, one interwoven throughout
the previous characteristics, is that it accounts for complexity and nuance
through probabilistic thinking. Probabilistic thinking is a tricky topic for
people to wrap their heads around, especially if they have little formal
training in statistics. In a nutshell, it refers to the idea that our world is
complex, and therefore one can expect a degree of random chance in almost
everything. For example, while there’s a good chance it will rain if there are
dark, stormy-looking clouds in the sky, there is a chance it might not rain.
Weather is a complex system, after all; thousands of variables interact to
determine the weather in a given area at a given time. Scientific models
cannot possibly account for every one of these variables, but scientists do the
best they can using the models they have while recognizing that there is a
chance the predictions generated by their model might be incorrect. Based on
a handful of variables, a scientist might predict that there’s an 80% chance of
rain today, recognizing that there is a 20% chance the model could be wrong.
Those unaccustomed to probabilistic thinking often fall prey to black-
and-white, all-or-nothing thinking. You probably know people who get angry
at the local weather report when it rains on a day that was predicted to be
sunny. This is because we live our lives one day at a time, interacting with
one person at a time, in one situation at a time; we care about individual
outcomes, like whether a sick relative will recover or die, whether our
favorite football team will win or lose the next game, or whether the value of
our stock will go up or down in value.
Scientists don’t develop models to predict individual people or events,
however. Because the world is such a complex place, scientists know they
won’t be able to perfectly predict 100% of outcomes. Instead, they develop
models to predict general tendencies, trends, and overall patterns in the data.
Returning to our pet store example, we can imagine an extrovert walking into
the pet store and purchasing a cat instead of the dog that we would have
15 The peer-review process, while essential to science, is far from perfect. For
example, reviewers may have their own biases, which can prevent high-quality
research from being published (or allow lower-quality research to be published, if it
supports the reviewer’s model or theory). Papers can also find themselves rejected
for reasons other than the quality of the study (e.g., because it was deemed
uninteresting, overly niche, or too similar to a paper that’s already been published).
48
predicted. What can we conclude from this? On its face, we might conclude
from this single example that the model is wrong.
In reality, however, countless variables impact whether a person walks
out of the store with a cat or a dog: their personality traits, the size of their
apartment, prior history with cats and dogs, the availability and cost of cats
and dogs in the store, allergies to cat or dog hair, social acceptability of cats
or dogs in the area—the list is endless. A model that could perfectly predict
pet purchasing behavior would need to take all of these variables and more
into account and would be impossibly complex to build. Even with the
combined effort of thousands of researchers and data from millions of people
to develop such a model, it would be impossible to guarantee that the model
would be 100% correct every time.
So, is the solution to simply abandon the whole practice of trying to
predict anything complex, like pet-purchasing behavior, stock prices,
weather patterns, or a person’s likelihood of survival? Hopefully, you realize
the answer is no. Even if a model is not perfectly predictive, it can still be
useful. Imagine, for example, that a person’s extraversion score, while not
perfectly predictive of pet-buying behavior, could correctly predict their
choice of pets 75% of the time. While far from perfect, it’s a vast
improvement over being correct 50% of the time by just randomly guessing.
Likewise, if you knew the weather forecast for tomorrow was predicting an
80% chance of rain, you probably wouldn’t go out of your way to plan a
picnic for tomorrow, even if there is a 20% chance the model might be
wrong. Imperfect models can still be valuable!
What’s more, scientists can improve the predictive ability of their models
by adding variables. Extroversion scores might make our theoretical model
75% accurate at predicting pet ownership, but maybe, if we consider a few
more variables, like age, income, and whether they had a dog or a cat in their
past, we can improve our model’s accuracy to 85%—not too shabby! And
with additional variables in the model, the accuracy of the model may
improve even more!
Because the world is complex, there is seldom a single cause for anything
in this world, whether it’s a stock market boom, a bridge collapsing, or a
patient unexpectedly recovering from a disease. This is why it can sometimes
be maddeningly frustrating to get a clear answer from a scientist, especially
if your question has to do with a single event or a person. A doctor can tell
you that 75% of people with a particular disease end up dying from it, but
they can’t tell you for sure whether your sick grandfather will be one of those
75% or not.
49
This is what we mean when we say that scientific thinking involves
probabilistic thinking and understanding complexity and nuance: it’s a very
different way of thinking than most people are accustomed to, one that
doesn’t come naturally. In fact, every facet of the scientific way of
thinking—forming empirically derived models, coming up with ways to test
and re-test those models, embracing and actively seeking out evidence that
one might be wrong, and appreciating nuance and probabilistic thinking in
those models—are skills that need to be taught to scientists through years of
education and practice. In the same way that athletes spend years learning
how to think strategically about their sport, mechanics spend years learning
how parts of an engine work together, and artists spend years learning how to
make the image in their head come to life on the canvas, scientists have to be
taught how to think scientifically.
And sure, it’s a lot of work learning to change the way you think, but
when it comes to explaining how this complex world of ours works, humans
haven’t found a better, more reliable way to acquire this knowledge than
through science.
Study Design: Exploration, Description, Correlation, and Causation
As mentioned in the previous section, one of the most important activities
that scientists engage in is the systematic collection of data. This is usually
done when forming new theories and models or, in later stages of research,
when testing how well models hold up to scrutiny. Regardless of the specific
goal, scientists employ carefully designed studies to do the job. And, just as
an athlete, artist, or mechanic has to choose the right tool for the job,
scientists must choose which of a variety of different study types is
appropriate for the task at hand.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s break down the different goals a scientist may
have into four types: exploration, description, correlation, and causation.
Each of these goals has a different set of requirements and will require
different tools to accomplish. To use an analogy, a screwdriver, while useful
for screwing in a screw, isn’t an especially good hammer, even if it might be
able to partially do the job of a hammer in a pinch. It would be silly to judge
the usefulness of a screwdriver based on its ability to hammer something into
place since it was never designed for that purpose. Even if a mechanic may
find themselves using a screwdriver more than a hammer, there are jobs
where a screwdriver just won’t get the job done, and on those days, a
hammer is the best fit for the job.
The same can be said for our four different types of goals: a study
designed for the purpose of exploration may not be especially useful at
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testing correlation or causation, while a study built to test causal direction
may be poorly suited for basic exploration. While this may seem obvious in
the abstract, it’s a point I often have to explain to students and laypersons
alike, many of whom latch onto one type of study as being the ideal, with all
others being deemed inferior because they are not the preferred type of study.
This tendency persists even when another study design would be vastly more
appropriate for the purpose being considered. Keep this in mind as we
proceed through this section: there are no “perfect” studies, only studies
whose strengths and weaknesses make them better suited or less suitable for
a particular task. It’s okay to have a fondness for screwdrivers, but realize
that you may occasionally need a hammer to get the job done!
Goal: Exploration
To start, let’s consider the task of exploration. Exploration often
represents a scientist’s first foray into a topic. Oftentimes, it’s a subject that
few others have looked at, meaning the scientist may have little existing
theory or data to draw upon for guidance. In such circumstances, scientists
may find themselves so unfamiliar with the subject that they’re not even sure
where to begin. What are the right questions to ask and are there any existing
models that are appropriate?
Let’s imagine that a scientist wants to study a subculture about which
relatively little is known. For our purpose, let’s use the example of the
community of players who play the Dark Souls series of video games.16
There may be existing research on related topics (e.g., people who play other
genres of video games, research on gamer culture more broadly), but our
intrepid scientist finds nothing specifically on the subject of Dark Souls fans.
The scientist’s ultimate goal is to better understand Dark Souls fans, but, not
being a fan themselves or a member of the culture, it’s hard to even know
where to begin. Would it be appropriate to apply models of gamer motivation
that were derived from other video game fan communities (e.g., fans of real-
time strategy games) to this community, or would such a model be woefully
inadequate at explaining what compels Dark Souls fans? Is there anything
unique about the Dark Souls genre that makes its fans distinct from other
types of fans? Is there any special vocabulary or knowledge that the
researcher needs to know to make sense of the sorts of responses Dark Souls
16 For readers who are unaware, the Dark Souls franchise is a series of 3rd-person
action roleplaying games in which players fight their way through dark, destroyed,
fantasy-themed worlds filled with larger-than-life enemies. The franchise is
renowned both for its infamous level of difficulty as well as for the memes generated
by its fanbase.
51
fans might provide? Without knowing the answer to these sorts of questions,
it’s hard for the scientist to gain a foothold in this area of research.
This is why researchers may want to start their initial foray into a topic
with exploratory research. In this type of research, the emphasis is on getting
a handle on the important ideas, research questions, and idiosyncrasies of a
topic. As one might imagine, thinking about relevant questions to ask at this
stage of the process can be tricky, as the researcher may lack important
terminology or knowledge of the group, its composition, or its history. As an
example, an unaware researcher might ask Dark Souls fans to describe their
favorite driving/vehicle section from the series, only to find out that the
question makes no sense in a genre that has no vehicle or driving sections.
Without talking to a few fans of the series or learning more about the game
in advance (e.g., by playing it or watching videos of it for themselves), there
would be no way for our scientist to know this!
For this reason, exploratory research rarely involves the use of highly
specific, targeted questions. Instead, researchers approach the topic with a
broad range of very general questions and an emphasis on passive, open-
minded observation rather than active, targeted testing of a specific
hypothesis. Studies ideally suited to this purpose include field observation,
focus groups, individual interviews, and surveys with open-ended
(qualitative) questions.17 Our scientist could sit down and watch a few
players playing Dark Souls while taking notes and making observations (they
could even try it themselves). Alternatively, they could interview a few Dark
Souls players and ask them very broad, open-ended questions about the game
and their experience playing it, recording the responses to see whether
common themes, important terms, relevant research questions, and new ideas
emerge.
Goal: Description
Having nailed down some of the basic concepts in a field through
exploratory research, our scientist may shift into descriptive research.
Descriptive research seeks to measure and accurately describe the state of a
phenomenon. At this point, the researcher isn’t looking to test or explain
anything, but rather to document the phenomenon as it is and accurately
capture it on relevant dimensions. Returning to our Dark Souls example, our
researcher might take the information they gathered from their interviews
17 Qualitative questions refer to open-ended questions designed to elicit detail-rich
responses from respondents. This is often contrasted against quantitative measures,
which involve gathering numeric data (e.g., counting the number of times a
respondent does something or a response on a 7-point scale).
52
and decide that some of the important variables worth studying include the
number of games played in the series, the number of hours played per game,
the number of messages players post in a Dark Souls forum, and the number
of friends they have who also play the Dark Souls games. If these were
topics that came up again and again during interviews, the researcher may
want to get an accurate picture of how several players measure up on
relevant variables.
To satisfy this goal, the researcher may design a simple survey to give to
a large number of Dark Souls players. In an effort to try and get as accurate a
snapshot of the Dark Souls fan base as possible, they may try to cast an
especially wide net, gathering data on thousands of Dark Souls fans from
around the world. Each player would be asked, through the survey, a set of
fairly basic questions inspired by the exploratory research, almost like a
census of players. From this data, the researcher might gain a basic
understanding of the characteristics of a typical Dark Souls fan, as well as
how much variability exists within the fan community when it comes to this
subject. In a nutshell, it gives them a snapshot of the state of the Dark Souls
community.
Goal: Correlation
As a next step, our scientists may want to go beyond the data they’ve
collected so far to construct a model to represent Dark Souls fans. This
model would draw inferences from the existing data, suggesting connections
and forming hypotheses about players and their behavior. Perhaps the
researcher notices, for example, that people who play the game a lot also
seem to be the same people who post about their accomplishments in forums
and are also the first to offer help to newer players. From this observation,
the researcher wonders whether there might be a link between these two
concepts, and sets out to test whether their casual observation holds
empirical water. They may be able to test this hypothesis statistically, based
on the data they already have, or they may have to run an additional study
that more precisely measures the variables in question; instead of asking
players if they post in forums, researchers may ask them to quantify what
percentage of their forum posts are dedicated to helping newer players. Or,
rather than asking about the approximate number of hours they’ve played,
the researcher may ask more precise questions about the exact number of
hours played on their account, or ask players how many hours they have
played in the past week as a measure of their current tendency to play.
Regardless of how they measure the variables in question, the point of
this research is to test for correlations—that is, to measure two or more
53
variables quantitatively and test whether there is statistical evidence for a
connection between them. At the end of the day, correlational research boils
down to testing whether the researcher can state with confidence that two
different variables co-vary with one another: If you know what a person’s
score on Variable X is (e.g., number of hours played), can you predict, with a
reasonable degree of accuracy, what their score on Variable Y is (e.g.,
frequency of helping newer players).
Goal: Causation
Assuming our scientist finds empirical support for their hypothesis in the
study above (e.g., a statistically significant correlation between two
variables), the final step to understanding the phenomenon is to be able to
explain why. Sure, they found that players who play more are also the same
players who help newcomers, but why is this the case? One possibility is that
playing more hours of the game causes people to become more helpful,
perhaps because one needs to become skilled themselves before they can
teach the skills to another player. The reverse causal direction represents
another possibility: perhaps players who help other players get a warm, fuzzy
feeling from doing so, which drives them to want to keep playing the game,
which ultimately helps them hone their skills. A third possibility is also true:
maybe those who have friends that play Dark Souls are more likely to help
others (e.g., their friends) and are also more likely to play more because they
can talk with their friends about the game—in this case, there is no actual
causation happening, but rather the illusion of causation caused by some
third variable being related to the two correlated variables (e.g., having a
friend who plays).
From a statistical perspective, finding a significant correlation cannot tell
us which of these possible causal directions is true; it could be any one of
them, or it could well be all of them. This is a significant limitation of
correlational studies—they can only tell us that two variables are related, not
whether one causes the other to occur. In order to go to the last step and
establish causal direction (and, thus, explain how or why something
happens), additional steps are needed. Specifically, scientists need to be able
to establish temporal order—that is, they need to be able to show that
changes to one of the variables comes before changes in the other variable—
and they need to be able to rule out possible alternative explanations which
may create the illusion of causality where there is none.
Fortunately, while correlational studies (e.g., surveys) fall short, there is a
type of study specifically designed to test causal direction: experiments. An
experiment is designed to allow researchers to rule out all possible
54
alternative explanations and to show not only that two variables are related,
but also to test whether one variable causes changes in the other to occur.
Unfortunately, the drawback of experiments is that they can be difficult to
do, and often involve artificially controlling circumstances to ensure a pure
test of causality. Without going into too much detail, the core of an
experiment is the random assignment of participants to one or more
conditions or levels of the variable you believe to be the “causer” variable.18
In a medical experiment testing the effectiveness of a drug, for example,
participants are randomly assigned to get a certain amount of the drug; some
participants may get none of the drug (the control condition), some may get a
little bit of the drug (a treatment condition), and some participants may get a
lot of the drug (another treatment condition). In our Dark Souls study, we
might get some gamers who have never played Dark Souls before and
randomly assign them to either play no Dark Souls or to play a bunch of
Dark Souls.
After this manipulation, the researchers look for a change in the outcome
variable, the variable thought to be caused by the first variable.19 In the drug
trial, researchers might measure a person’s health or recovery after
manipulating the amount of the drug they get. In our Dark Souls example,
the scientist might give participants a chance to cooperate with another new
player to see whether they work together and help the other player. The logic
of the experiment is this: if we notice a difference between the conditions,
we can say that the manipulated variable caused the change in the second
variable to happen, since it came before the second variable. In other words,
it doesn’t make sense to say that the recovery caused an increase in the
amount of medicine a person received, because the recovery came afterward.
Likewise, we can’t say that helping other players came first because we know
that the gameplay came first; we designed the experiment specifically to
ensure that this was the case!
Astute readers might recall that part of the requirement for establishing
causation involves ruling out alternative explanations. How can an
experiment do that? How do we know, for example, that we didn’t
coincidentally put people who were going to recover on their own in the “get
the medicine” condition and people who were bound to get sicker in the “no
medicine” condition? Likewise, how do we know that we didn’t just put the
more helpful people in the “play Dark Souls” condition and all the jerks in
the “no play” condition?
18 In technical parlance, this is referred to as the “independent variable.”
19 This variable is known as the “dependent variable.”
55
This is where we see the importance of random assignment. By assigning
people to their conditions randomly, the participants in the different
conditions are, in the eyes of statistics, completely equal. If we truly assigned
people at random, then it should be incredibly unlikely that all of the healthy
people wound up in one condition, or all of the helpful people wound up in
one condition, purely by chance. Imagine taking a room full of people,
flipping a coin, and randomly assigning the heads to one side of the room
and the tails to the other side of the room. If you did this, how likely is it that,
by pure coincidence alone, all of the blonde-haired people wound up on one
side of the room while all of the brown-haired people wound up on the other
side? Is it possible? Sure. But is it likely? No.20 This is why, as long as
participants were randomly assigned to their condition, we can assume the
conditions are equal at the start of the study.
And why is it so important that the two conditions are the same at the
start of the study? If we assume that the conditions are the same at the start
of the study, and then they are different at the end of the study (e.g., more
healthy people in the drug condition, more people cooperating with new
players in the playing condition), the only possible explanation is the one
single difference between the groups: our manipulation. This logic is what
allows experiments to rule out all possible alternative explanations.
However, as you’ve seen, it also requires a fair amount of planning and
control and is often, though not always, going to be harder to run than, say,
emailing a single survey out to thousands of people online.
To summarize this section: scientists have a variety of tools available to
them in the form of different study designs. Some designs are perfectly
designed to gather rich, detailed content straight from the mouths of
participants without any researcher interference or bias. These studies, which
are ideally suited for exploratory studies, do not lend themselves well to
describing the average tendency or variability of a phenomenon (e.g., a
group of people), nor do they allow researchers to measure correlations
between variables or test causal explanations. Survey studies often build
upon this initial exploratory research, allowing researchers to describe a
phenomenon and measure correlations between variables, and can be easily
20 In fact, the likelihood of this happening by chance becomes smaller with each
additional person in the room. It’s easy to imagine how, if there were only four
people in the room, you might coincidentally assign the two brunettes to one side
and the two blondes to the other side by random chance alone. But, if there were 200
people in the room, the odds of this same thing happening due to chance alone are
astronomically small: the equivalent of flipping 200 heads in a row on a fair coin!
56
scaled up to large samples of a population. However, they typically lack the
ability to determine causation and typically reduce all of the complexity and
nuance of a participant’s response or experience down to a handful of
numbers on a scale. Finally, experiments can do what none of these other
studies are able to do—establish causal explanations between variables—but
they are often very limited in terms of scope (e.g., only being able to look at
a small handful of variables at a time) and are often more limited than
correlational studies when it comes to sample size.
As we mentioned before, it would be silly to say that any of these study
designs are inherently “better” or “worse” than any other design. Without
considering the context in which they are being used, we can’t say whether
experiments are more valuable than interviews or whether correlational
studies are more useful than focus groups or observation. Doing so would be
akin to saying that hammers are better than screwdrivers without knowing
whether the task involves driving in a nail or screwing in a screw.
Being an informed skeptic means considering the context and purpose of
the research being conducted before deciding the appropriateness of a
particular study design. This is the lesson overlooked by many a layperson
and college student who dismiss qualitative studies out of hand simply
because they aren’t experiments. As you read about the research in this book,
keep in mind the types of questions being answered and the sort of study that
would be ideally suited to that particular task. In doing so, you’ll avoid many
of the common pitfalls of casual skeptics and be better able to weigh in on
the merits and weaknesses of the research being discussed.21
A Pain-Free Lesson in Basic Statistics
We can feel the collective shudder of readers who saw the heading of this
section and opted to skip over it to the next section. So kudos to you, brave
21 To help with this task, much of the research being presented in this book is
descriptive in nature, aiming to describe the state of the furry fandom as it is (e.g.,
demographics). There is also a lot of research aimed at initially exploring, in a very
broad and open sense, various facets of the furry fandom (e.g., what is a furry?).
Finally, there are a smaller number of topics which look for correlations between
variables (e.g., identifying as a furry and well-being). While many of these studies
seem to lend themselves naturally to questions about causal direction, in many
instances we cannot manipulate the predictor variable in question (e.g., manipulating
whether or not a person is a furry), which makes it impossible to conduct true
experiments—and test causal hypotheses—on these topics. We address such
limitations later in this chapter.
57
reader, for being one of the few who decided to tough it out and give a
section on statistics a gander. Hopefully, you won’t be disappointed!
The number of people who almost certainly skipped over this section
reflects a general fear of mathematics, one that many of the authors of this
book recognize both in the general population and in our own undergraduate
students. Unfortunately, whether we like them or not, statistics abound in the
world around us. If you’ve ever read an opinion poll in the weeks leading up
to an election, you’ve been exposed to statistics. If you’ve ever read an
advertisement for a product that claimed to clean 20% better than the leading
competitor or to kill 99.9% of germs, you’ve encountered statistics. If you’ve
ever seen the batting average of your favorite baseball player, you’ve seen
statistics.
The omnipresence of statistics wouldn’t be such a bad thing, in and of
itself, if we left their interpretation to the experts.22 In reality, however,
statistics are often misapplied, misunderstood, and misrepresented—
sometimes deliberately and sometimes not—leading to confusion at best and,
at worst, mistrust and disinformation. Speaking to this idea, we’ve
encountered more than a few lay skeptics of our work who, after looking at
summaries of our findings, decided that they disagree with our conclusions—
not because they have any specific criticism of our methodology or its
theoretical underpinning, but simply because they don’t understand how the
statistics came to be, what the statistics mean, or assume that the statistics
were deliberately manipulated to mislead them.
This is precisely why we’re attempting to lift the veil and dispel some of
the intrigue and apparent mysteriousness of statistics here. To be sure, we’ve
deliberately chosen to keep our display of statistical procedures and outputs
to a minimum throughout this book to improve its readability. That said,
every single finding we present in this book is underpinned by at least one
statistical analysis.23 We hope that, with a little bit of explanation, we can
help create more informed readers who are better able to critically evaluate
our findings for themselves and who, when skeptical, can challenge the
22 While we’re at it, we could also probably stand to leave medicine to the doctors,
psychology to the psychologists, teaching to the teachers, and climate science to the
environmental scientists.
23 In fact, inquisitive readers are welcome to contact us if they wish to take a look
“under the hood” and look at any of the statistical analyses that went into this book!
More often than not, it’s other scientists who want us to “show our work,” but we’re
happy to do so for anyone who wants to see it for themselves!
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findings on substantive grounds, rather than out of a general mistrust of
statistics.
Descriptive Statistics—Central Tendency
With our goal stated, let’s begin with the simplest type of statistics—the
type most readers are likely to be familiar with—descriptive statistics.
Descriptive statistics are a way to condense a bunch of data into a simple,
easy-to-understand summary. The most common and intuitive of these
statistics refer to central tendency, that is, a summary of what is typical, most
prevalent, or most likely in a sample.
One of the most common statistics relating to central tendency is an
average. An average, or mean, is calculated mathematically from the data,
the result of adding up all the values and dividing by the number of values.
Averages are a fairly simple way of approximating what is typical in a group
and are fairly intuitive to understand. If, for example, I were to tell you that
the average person in a room has $20 in their pocket, you would probably
have a basic understanding of the amount of spending power (in cash) that
the people in the room have. You also probably understand that just because
the average person has $20 in their pocket doesn’t mean that everyone has
exactly $20 in their pocket; some people may have only $10, while others
may have $30.24 In fact, it’s possible that no one in the room has $20 in their
pocket, and the room is instead comprised entirely of an equal number of
people with $10 in their pocket and $30 in their pocket. Either way, if you
want to sell something to the people in the room, knowing what the average
person is able to spend in cash would be useful information.25
24 Despite the intuitiveness of this principle in a simple example like this, people
often forget this idea in other contexts. If, while giving a talk, I were to say that the
average furry is in their early-to-mid 20s, a fairly common response is for an older
furry to argue that they are much older than this. This tendency may underpin some
peoples’ distrust of statistics, feeling like an average score doesn’t reflect their own
experience and must, therefore, be trying to cover up or deny their experience. To be
sure, statistics of central tendency do, by design, speak only about common
experiences and fail to display the full range of responses. The problem is not with
the calculation of the statistic, however, nor is it incorrect that the average represents
the group’s central tendency. Instead, the skeptic’s problem may lie in their desire to
see the full range of responses, which is perfectly defensible, especially when it
comes to overlooking underrepresented minorities. This only emphasizes the
importance of being able to precisely voice the source of one’s concern, to avoid
throwing blame in the wrong direction.
25 Of course, in other contexts, you might not be at all interested in central tendency.
For example, in conjunction with the previous footnote, you may be more interested
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When it comes to summarizing central tendency, averages aren’t the only
game in town. Other statistics similarly describe central tendency, albeit in
slightly different ways. For example, the mode refers to the most common
value in a group. If, for example, most people had $20 in their pocket, with
some people having $10 and an equal number having $30 in their pocket, we
could say that the modal value is also $20, the same as the average. But one
can also imagine other datasets where a few extremely high or low values
pull the average score up, making the average less useful. If, for example,
everyone in the room had $20 in their pocket, but one person in the room had
$50,000 in their pocket, the average amount of pocket money in the room
would be much higher than $20—perhaps closer to $1000. As a vendor,
however, it would probably be more useful for you to know that most people
in the room only have about $20, allowing you to better adjust your prices or
to more appropriately stock your store with goods in the $20 range.
Another alternative is to consider the median value of a group—that is,
the “middle” value of the group. If you can imagine lining up all the values
from smallest to largest, the median score would be the score directly in the
middle of the line-up. For example, if there were 5 people in the room, the
amount of money on the person with the 3rd highest amount of money (the
middle score between 1 and 5) would be the median score. The median is
another way to assess the central tendency of a group in a way that’s immune
to extremely high or low values. Returning to our previous example, it
wouldn’t matter if the person with the most money in the room had $50 or
$50,000 in their pocket, the person with the 3rd-most money would remain
the same. For this reason, the median and mode scores are sometimes used to
describe the central tendency of a dataset when extremely high or low values
are present as a more representative way of showing the state of a typical
person in the sample.
Descriptive Statistics—Variance
So far, we’ve spoken about statistics of central tendency. These are, by
far, the statistics most laypersons will be familiar with. After all, they
represent the sorts of statistics most people are interested in: How much does
the average person in your workplace make? Which candidate did most
people vote for? How tall is the average athlete in the NBA? However, there
are other important dimensions to consider when looking at a dataset. For
in the full range of available money in peoples’ pockets. For such a research
question, we might say that a measure of central tendency isn’t especially helpful.
It’s not a bad statistic or an erroneous statistic, it’s just not the statistic that’s best
suited to answering the specific question that you’re interested in.
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instance, in a room where the average person has $20, does everyone in the
room have exactly $20 in their pocket, or are there differences in how much
every person has? If so, how big are these differences? It might be useful to
know, for example, whether the amount of money in peoples’ pockets varies
from $15-$25 or whether it varies from $0-$40.
What we’re describing here is variance: the amount that scores differ
around the central tendency. In a sample with absolutely 0 variances,
everyone would have the exact same score. As variance goes up, so too does
the distance between scores and the central tendency. With greater variance,
we expect people to differ more from the average score and to differ from it
by a greater amount. In fact, we can even calculate the average amount that a
typical person differs from the average score, a value known as the standard
deviation.26 For example, if the average amount of money in the pocket of
people in a room is $20 with a standard deviation of $1, we can say that the
average person differs from $20 by about $1. If we compare this to a room
with an average amount of money of $20 and a standard deviation of $10, we
can say that people in the second room are more likely to have $10 or $30 in
their pockets than people in the first room. Another way to put is that both
rooms have an average of $20 per person, but the second room is “noisier” in
that peoples’ scores vary more around that central tendency.
Inferential Statistics—t-Tests
To this point, we’ve seen how we can use descriptive statistics to
summarize the general shape of a dataset. For example, without looking at a
spreadsheet full of numbers, you know that there is more money in a room
with an average amount per person of $50 than there is in a room with an
average amount per person of $10. You also know that you’ll probably be
closer to estimating the amount of money in a given person’s pocket in a
room with a standard deviation of $1 than in a room with a standard
deviation of $5. Applied to the real world, we can use measures like these to
predict which states are the most likely to vote for one political party or
another (or which will be a toss-up) and to know which restaurants are
probably going to lead to a better dining experience (e.g., based on online
ratings).
And, if we only ever used statistics to concisely describe phenomena in
the world around us, that would be pretty darned useful. However, we can
also use these statistics in a much more powerful way. Using a category of
statistics called inferential statistics, we can go beyond merely describing a
26 It’s slightly more complicated than that, but for present purposes, this gets the
point across!
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dataset and start answering more complex questions about it. For instance,
descriptive statistics typically only looks at a single variable at a time (e.g.,
age), and so they’re fairly limited in the types of questions we can ask (e.g.,
how old is the average furry?) But what about questions that involve
associations between two or more variables?
For example, let’s suppose we want to answer the question “who’s better
at science, anime fans or sports fans?” This is a question that involves two
variables: a person’s science skill and the fan group one belongs to. By
involving more than one variable, it becomes a much more interesting, but
complex, question to answer. One way to test it would be to get a sample of
anime fans and a sample of sports fans, give them a science test, and see
which group performs better. Pretty straightforward, right? Let’s say we did
that: we grabbed 5 anime fans and 5 sports fans, gave them a science test,
and found that anime fans scored an average of 70% and sports fans scored
an average of 60%. What would we conclude from this?
At first glance, the answer seems pretty obvious: the anime fans seem
better at science, since they scored, on average, higher than the sports fans.
But remember, our question wasn’t “who is better at science, a sample of
anime fans or a sample of sports fans”—we want to make a claim about all
anime fans and all sports fans. As we’ll discuss in a later section of this
chapter, it’s pretty much impossible for us to measure all anime fans and all
sports fans. As such, we’re stuck trying to draw conclusions about which
group is smarter based only on these two samples.
Still, you might argue, our samples seem to suggest that anime fans were
smarter, so what’s the problem? Well, what if we were to grab another
random sample of 5 anime fans and another sample of 5 sports fans? Would
we expect anime fans to win again, or is it possible that sports fans might
win next time?
Let’s imagine some possible datasets, this time with variance information
in addition to central tendency. Let’s imagine, for example, that the anime
fans’ scores looked like this (70%, 68%, 69%, 71%, and 72%) and the sports
fans' scores looked like this (60%, 58%, 62%, 61%, 59%). What does this
suggest? Well, we can see that the anime fans scored an average of 70%, and
every anime fan in our sample scored pretty close to that. We can also see
that sports fans scored an average of 60%, and every sports fan scored pretty
close to that. So, if we were to grab another 5 anime fans and another 5
sports fans, what might we expect? Well, given how little variability we
found in the scores, we might reasonably expect another set of anime fans to
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score pretty close to 70% and another set of sports fans to score pretty close
to 60%, since there doesn’t seem to be much variability in their scores here.
Now, imagine a different dataset. This time, anime fans’ scores looked
like this (70%, 95%, 45%, 100%, 40%) and sports fans’ scores looked like
this (60%, 100%, 20%, 90%, 30%). The averages are the same as the
previous dataset: an average of 70% for anime fans and 60% for sports fans.
But if we were to pull 5 new anime fans and 5 new sports fans, would you
expect the averages to stay the same? Probably not. With so much variability
in these scores, there’s every reason to believe that our next set of anime fans
may well contain several people who fail, while the next set of sports fans
may contain a lot of people who did really well.
In other words, our question about which group is better at science is
more complex than at first glance: it’s not enough to just compare the
average scores of the two groups and see which is higher. We also need to
consider information about the variability of the group scores to see whether
we might expect the same result if we were to run the study again, or
whether we would expect a different result next time. This is, at its core, the
logic behind a type of statistical test known as a t-test: comparing how big
the difference is between the average of two groups compared to how much
variability is in the two groups. If there is a big difference between the group
averages and if there is relatively little variability in each group’s scores, we
can conclude that, yes, one group’s scores are statistically significantly
higher than the other group, meaning we would expect to find the difference
again and again if we were to keep sampling from those populations.27