| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Norma Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming | "for their report Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain" | |
| Chemistry | Theodore Gray | "for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table" | |
| Economics | The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut & Hauspie, Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International, Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom, Global Crossing, HIH Insurance, Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications, McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen | "for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world" | |
| Hygiene | Eduardo Segura | "for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs" | |
| Interdisciplinary Research | Karl Kruszelnicki | "for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint — who gets it, when, what color, and how much" | |
| Literature | Vicki Silvers Gier and David S. Kreiner | for their colorful report The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension" | |
| Mathematics | K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan | "for their analytical report Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants" | |
| Medicine | Chris McManus | "for his excruciatingly balanced report, Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture" | |
| Peace | Keita Sato,Matsumi Suzuki, and Norio Kogure | "for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device" | |
| Physics | | "for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | C. W. Moeliker | "for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck" | |
| Chemistry | Yukio Hirose | "for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons" | |
| Economics | Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein | "for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings" | |
| Engineering | John Paul Stapp, Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols | "for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it" " | |
| Interdisciplinary Research | Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist | "for their report Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans" | |
| Literature | John Trinkaus | "for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him " | |
| Medicine | Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith | "for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens" | |
| Peace | Lal Bihari | "for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People" | |
| Physics | Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams | "for their irresistible report An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces" | |
| Psychology | Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip Zimbardo | "for their discerning report Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Ben Wilson, Lawrence Dill, Robert Batty, Magnus Whalberg, and Hakan Westerberg | "for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting" | |
| Chemistry | The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain | "for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap water into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers" | |
| Economics | The Vatican | "for outsourcing prayers to India" | |
| Engineering | Donald J. Smith, Frank J. Smith | "for patenting the combover" | |
| Literature | The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA | "for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it" | |
| Medicine | Steven Stack and James Gundlach | "for their published report The Effect of Country Music on Suicide" | |
| Peace | Daisuke Inoue | "for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other" | |
| Physics | Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael Turvey | "for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping" | |
| Psychology | Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris | "for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else — even a woman in a gorilla suit" | |
| Public Health | Jillian Clarke | "for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Agricultural History | James Watson | "for his scholarly study, The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers" | |
| Biology | Benjamin Smith, Craig Williams, Michael Tyler, Brian Williams, Yoji Hayasaka | "for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed." | |
| Chemistry | Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger | "for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?" | |
| Economics | Gauri Nanda | "for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday" | |
| Fluid Dynamics | Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal | "for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation" | |
| Literature | The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria | "for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters — General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others — each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them" | |
| Medicine | Gregg A. Miller | "for inventing Neuticles — artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness" | |
| Nutrition | Yoshiro Nakamatsu | "for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years " | |
| Peace | Claire Rind and Peter Simmons | for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie Star Wars" | |
| Physics | John Mainstone and Thomas Parnell | "for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Acoustics | D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand | "for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard" | |
| Biology | Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong | "for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet" | |
| Chemistry | Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon | "for their study Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature" | |
| Literature | Daniel Oppenheimer | "for his report Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly" | |
| Mathematics | Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes | "for calculating the number of photographs you must take to ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed" | |
| Medicine | Francis M. Fesmire | "for his medical case report Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage" | |
| Medicine | Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven | "for their subsequent medical case report also titled Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage" | |
| Nutrition | Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Mussalam | "for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters" | |
| Ornithology | Ivan R. Schwab and Philip R.A. May | "for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches" | |
| Peace | Howard Stapleton | "for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant — a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers" | |
| Physics | Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch | "for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Aviation | Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek | "for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters" | |
| Biology | Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk | "for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night" | |
| Chemistry | Mayu Yamamoto | "for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung" | |
| Economics | Kuo Cheng Hsieh | "for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them" | |
| Linguistics | Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés | "for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards" | |
| Literature | Glenda Browne | "for her study of the word the — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order" | |
| Medicine | Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer | "for their penetrating medical report Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects" | |
| Nutrition | Brian Wansink | "for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup" | |
| Peace | Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio | "for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called gay bomb — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other" | |
| Physics | L. Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca | "for studying how sheets become wrinkled" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Archaeology | Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino | "for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo" | |
| Biology | Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc | "for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat" | |
| Chemistry | Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson | "for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide" | |
| Chemistry | Chuang-Ye Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang | "for discovering that it is not" | |
| Cognitive Science | Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro, and Ágotá Tóth | "for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles" | |
| Economics | Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, and Brent Jordan | "for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating" | |
| Literature | David Sims | "for his lovingly written study You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations" | |
| Medicine | Dan Ariely, Rebecca L. Waber, Baba Shiv, and Ziv Carmon | "for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine" | |
| Nutrition | Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence | "for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is" | |
| Peace | The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland | "for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity" | |
| Physics | Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith | "for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei | "for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas" | |
| Chemistry | Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño | "for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila" | |
| Economics | The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland | "for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy" | |
| Literature | Ireland's police service | "for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means Driving License" | |
| Mathematics | Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank | "for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000)" | |
| Medicine | Donald L. Unger | "for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty years" | |
| Peace | Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl | "for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle" | |
| Physics | Katherine K. Whitcome, Daniel E. Lieberman, and Liza J. Shapiro | "for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over" | |
| Public Health | Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan | "for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander" | |
| Veterinary medicine | Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson | "for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang, and Gareth Jones | "for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats" | |
| Chemistry | Eric Adams, Scott Socolofsky, Stephen Masutani, and British Petroleum | "for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix" | |
| Economics | The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar | "for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof" | |
| Engineering | Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin, and Diane Gendron | "for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter" | |
| Management | Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo | "for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random" | |
| Medicine | Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest | "for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride" | |
| Peace | Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston | "for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain" | |
| Physics | Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest | "for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes" | |
| Public Health | Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor | "for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists" | |
| Transportation Planning | Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Dan Bebber, and Mark Fricker of the UK | "for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz | "for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle" | |
| Chemistry | Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami | "for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm" | |
| Literature | John Perry | "for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important" | |
| Mathematics | Dorothy Martin | "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations" | |
| Mathematics | Pat Robertson | "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations" | |
| Mathematics | Elizabeth Clare Prophet | "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations" | |
| Mathematics | Lee Jang Rim | "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations" | |
| Mathematics | Credonia Mwerinde | "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations" | |
| Mathematics | Harold Camping | "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations" | |
| Medicine | Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe, and Luk Warlop | "for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things, when they have a strong urge to urinate" | |
| Medicine | Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff | "for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things, when they have a strong urge to urinate" | |
| Peace | Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania | "for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank" | |
| Psychology | Karl Halvor Teigen | "for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh" | |
| Physics | Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru, and Herman Kingma | "for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't" | |
| Physiology | Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl, and Ludwig Huber | "for their study No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise" | |
| Public safety | John Senders | "for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Acoustics | Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada | "for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay" | |
| Anatomy | Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny | "for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends" | |
| Chemistry | Johan Pettersson | "for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green" | |
| Fluid Dynamics | Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer | "for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee" | |
| Literature | The US Government General Accountability Office | "for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports" | |
| Medicine | Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti | "for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode" | |
| Neuroscience | Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford | "for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon" | |
| Peace | The SKN Company | "for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds" | |
| Physics | Joseph Keller | "for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail" | |
| Physics | Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, and, | "for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail" | |
| Psychology | Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, and Tulio Guadalupe | "for their study Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Archaeology | Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl | "for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days — all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not" | |
| Biology and Astronomy | Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke Scholtz, and Eric J. Warrant | "for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way" | |
| Chemistry | Shinsuke Imai, Nobuaki Tsuge, Muneaki Tomotake, Yoshiaki Nagatome, H. Sawada,Toshiyuki Nagata, and Hidehiko Kumagai | "for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized" | |
| Medicine | Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi | "for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice" | |
| Peace | Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus | "for making it illegal to applaud in public" | |
| Peace | Belarus State Police | "for arresting a one-armed man for applauding" | |
| Probability | Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts, and Colin Morgan | "for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again" | |
| Physics | Alberto Minetti, Yuri Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, and Francesco Lacquaniti | "for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond — if those people and that pond were on the moon" | |
| Psychology | Laurent Bègue, Brad Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah | "for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive" | |
| Public Health | Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde | "for the medical techniques described in their report Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam — techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck" | |
| Safety Engineering | Gustano Pizzo | "for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Arctic Science | Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl | "for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears" | |
| Art | Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea | "for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot by a powerful laser beam" | |
| Biology | Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika Němcová, Jana Adámková, Kateřina Benediktová, Jaroslav Červený and Hynek Burda | "for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines" | |
| Economics | Italian National Institute of Statistics | "for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants" | |
| Medicine | Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin | "for treating "uncontrollable" nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork." | |
| Neuroscience | Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee | "for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast" | |
| Nutrition | Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga | "for their study titled Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages" | |
| Physics | Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai | "for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor" | |
| Psychology | Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons | "for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning" | |
| Public Health | Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlíček and Jitka Hanušova-Lindova | "for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat" | |
| Public Health | David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried | "for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez, José Iriarte-Díaz | "for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked" | |
| Chemistry | Callum Ormonde, Colin Raston, Tom Yuan, Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin Pugliese, Tivoli Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, and Gregory Weiss | "for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg" | |
| Diagnostic Medicine | Diallah Karim, Anthony Harnden, Nigel D'Souza, Andrew Huang, Abdel Kader Allouni, Helen Ashdown, Richard J. Stevens, and Simon Kreckler | "for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps" | |
| Economics | The Bangkok Metropolitan Police | "for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes" | |
| Literature | Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick J. Enfield | "for discovering that the word huh? seems to exist in every human language — and for not being completely sure why" | |
| Management | Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, and P. Raghavendra Rau | "for discovering that many business leaders developed during childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters that — for them — had no dire personal consequences" | |
| Mathematics | Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer | "for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children." | |
| Medicine | Hajime Kimata | "for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing " | |
| Medicine | Jaroslava Durdiaková, Peter Celec, Natália Kamodyová, Tatiana Sedláčková, Gabriela Repiská, Barbara Sviežená, and Gabriel Minárik | "for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing " | |
| Physics | Patricia Yang, David Hu, and Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo | "for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds " | |
| Physiology and Entomology | Justin Schmidt | "for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects" | |
| Physiology and Entomology | Michael L. Smith | "for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful, and which are the most painful " | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Reproduction | Ahmed Shafik | "for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for conducting similar tests with human males" | |
| Economics | Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson | "for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective" | |
| Physics | Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth | "for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones" | |
| Chemistry | Volkswagen | "for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested" | |
| Medicine | Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas Münte, Silke Anders, and Andreas Sprenger | "for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body." | |
| Psychology | Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere | "for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers" | |
| Peace | Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang | "for their scholarly study called On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit" | |
| Biology | Charles Foster | "for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird" | |
| Biology | Thomas Thwaites | "for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats" | |
| Literature | | "for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead" | |
| Perception | Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi | "for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Physics | Marc-Antoine Fardin | "for using fluid dynamics to probe the question Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?" | |
| Peace | Milo Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio, Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz, and Otto Braendli | "for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring" | |
| Economics | Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer | "for their experiments to see how contact with a live crocodile affects a person's willingness to gamble" | |
| Anatomy | James Heathcote | "for his medical research study Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?" | |
| Biology | Kazunori Yoshizawa, Rodrigo Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura, and Charles Lienhard | "for their discovery of a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect" | |
| Fluid Dynamics | Jiwon Han | "for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee" | |
| Nutrition | Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres | "for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat" | |
| Medicine | Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly, and Tao Jiang | "for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese" | |
| Cognition | Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti | "for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually" | |
| Obstetrics | Marisa López-Teijón, Álex García-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallarés Aniorte | "for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother's vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother's belly" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Medicine | Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger | "for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones" | |
| Anthropology | Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen | "for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees" | |
| Biology | Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall | "for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine" | |
| Chemistry | Paula Romão, Adília Alarcão and the late César Viana | "for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces" | |
| Medical Education | Akira Horiuchi | "for the medical report Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy" | |
| Literature | Thea Blackler, Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic and M. Helen Thompson | "for documenting that most people who use complicated products do not read the instruction manual" | |
| Nutrition | James Cole | "for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets" | |
| Peace | Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge, Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Jaime Sanmartín, Constanza Calatayud, and Beatriz Alamar | "for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile" | |
| Reproductive Medicine | John Barry, Bruce Blank, and Michel Boileau | "for using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly—as described in their study Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring With Stamps" | |
| Economics | Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa Keeping | "for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Medicine | Silvano Gallus | "for collecting evidence that pizza might protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy" | |
| Medical Education | Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon | "for using a simple animal-training technique—called clicker training—to help new doctors acquire basic surgical skills" | |
| Biology | Ling-Jun Kong, Herbert Crepaz, Agnieszka Górecka, Aleksandra Urbanek, Rainer Dumke, and Tomasz Paterek | "for discovering that dead magnetized cockroaches behave differently than living magnetized cockroaches" | |
| Anatomy | Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa | "for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry in naked and clothed postmen in France" | |
| Chemistry | Shigeru Watanabe, Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kawano, and Seiji Igarashi | "for estimating the total saliva volume produced per day by a typical five-year-old child" | |
| Engineering | Iman Farahbakhsh | "for inventing a diaper-changing machine for use on human infants" | |
| Economics | Habip Gedik, Timothy A. Voss, and Andreas Voss | "for testing which country's paper money is best at transmitting dangerous bacteria" | |
| Peace | Ghada A. bin Saif, Alexandru Papoiu, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Shawn G. Kwatra, Yiong-Huak Chan, and Gil Yosipovitch | "for trying to measure the pleasurability of scratching an itch" | |
| Psychology | Fritz Strack | "for discovering that holding a pen in one's mouth makes one smile, which makes one happier — and for then discovering that it does not" | |
| Physics | Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Miles Chan, Alynn Martin, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver, and David Hu | "for studying how, and why, wombats make cube-shaped poo" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Acoustics | Stephan Reber, Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Janisch, Mark Robertson, and Tecumseh Fitch, | "for inducing a female Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air" | |
| Economics | Christopher Watkins, Juan David Leongómez, Jeanne Bovet, Agnieszka Żelaźniewicz, Max Korbmacher, Marco Antônio Corrêa Varella, Ana Maria Fernandez, Danielle Wagstaff, and Samuela Bolgan | "for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries' national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing" | |
| Entomology | Richard Vetter | "for collecting evidence that many entomologists are afraid of spiders, which are not insects" | |
| Management | Xi Guang-An, Mo Tian-Xiang, Yang Kang-Sheng, Yang Guang-Sheng, and Ling Xian Si | "five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who managed a contract for a hit job in the following way: After accepting payment to perform the murder, Xi Guang-An then instead subcontracted the task to Mo Tian-Xiang, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Kang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Guang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Ling Xian-Si, with each subsequently enlisted hitman receiving a smaller percentage of the fee, and nobody actually performing a murder" | |
| Materials Science | Metin Eren, Michelle Bebber, James Norris, Alyssa Perrone, Ashley Rutkoski, Michael Wilson, and Mary Ann Raghanti | "for showing that knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work well" | |
| Medicine | Nienke Vulink, Damiaan Denys, and Arnoud van Loon | "for diagnosing a long-unrecognized medical condition: Misophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds" | |
| Medical Education | Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the United States, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan | "for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can" | |
| Peace | The governments of India and Pakistan | "for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other's doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door" | |
| Physics | Ivan Maksymov and Andrey Pototsky | "for determining, experimentally, what happens to the shape of a living earthworm when one vibrates the earthworm at high frequency" | |
| Psychology | Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule | "for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Biology | Susanne Schötz, Robert Eklund, and Joost van de Weijer | "for analyzing variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat–human communication" | |
| Ecology | Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú, and Manuel Porcar | "for using genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries" | |
| Chemistry | Jörg Wicker, Nicolas Krauter, Bettina Derstroff, Christof Stönner, Efstratios Bourtsoukidis, Achim Edtbauer, Jochen Wulf, Thomas Klüpfel, Stefan Kramer, and Jonathan Williams | "for chemically analyzing the air inside movie theaters, to test whether the odors produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behavior, drug use, and bad language in the movie the audience is watching" | |
| Economics | Pavlo Blavatskyy | "for discovering that the obesity of a country's politicians may be a good indicator of that country's corruption" | |
| Medicine | Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare Oladokun, Burkard Lippert, and Ralph Hohenberger | "for demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing" | |
| Peace | Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier | "for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face" | |
| Physics | Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi | "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians" | |
| Kinetics | Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari | "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians" | |
| Entomology | John Mulrennan, Jr., Roger Grothaus, Charles Hammond, and Jay Lamdin | "for their research study A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines" | |
| Transportation | Robin Radcliffe, Mark Jago, Peter Morkel, Estelle Morkel, Pierre du Preez, Piet Beytell, Birgit Kotting, Bakker Manuel, Jan Hendrik du Preez, Michele Miller, Julia Felippe, Stephen Parry, and Robin Gleed | "for determining by experiment whether it is safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside-down" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Applied Cardiology | Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska Kret | "for seeking and finding evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time, and feel attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize" | |
| Literature | Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson | "for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand" | |
| Biology | Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado | "for studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions" | |
| Medicine | Marcin Jasiński, Martyna Maciejewska, Anna Brodziak, Michał Górka, Kamila Skwierawska, Wiesław Jędrzejczak, Agnieszka Tomaszewska, Grzegorz Basak, and Emilian Snarski | "for showing that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces one traditional component of the procedure" | |
| Engineering | Gen Matsuzaki, Kazuo Ohuchi, Masaru Uehara, Yoshiyuki Ueno, and Goro Imura | "for trying to discover the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob" | |
| Art History | Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth | "for their study A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery" | |
| Physics | Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, and Atilla Incecik | "for trying to understand how ducklings manage to swim in formation" | |
| Peace | Junhui Wu, Szabolcs Számadó, Pat Barclay, Bianca Beersma, Terence Dores Cruz, Sergio Lo Iacono, Annika Nieper, Kim Peters, Wojtek Przepiorka, Leo Tiokhin and Paul Van Lange | "for developing an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie" | |
| Economics | Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda | "for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest" | |
| Safety Engineering | Magnus Gens | "for developing a moose crash-test dummy" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Chemistry and Geology | Jan Zalasiewicz | "for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks" | |
| Literature | Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor | "for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times" | |
| Nutrition | Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura | "for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food" | |
| Medicine | Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska | "for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils" | |
| Mechanical Engineering | Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston | "for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools" | |
| Public Health | Seung-min Park | "for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete" | |
| Physics | Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido | "for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies" | |
| Education | Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan | "for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students" | |
| Communication | María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García | "for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward" | |
| Psychology | Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz | "for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Anatomy | Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari | "for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere." | |
| Biology | Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen | "for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that's standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk" | |
| Botany | Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita | "for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants" | |
| Chemistry | Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen | "for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms" | |
| Demography | Saul Justin Newman | "for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping" | |
| Medicine | Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel | "for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects" | |
| Peace | B. F. Skinner | "for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles" | |
| Physics | James C. Liao | "for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout" | |
| Physiology | Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe | "for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus" | |
| Probability | František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues | "for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started" | |
| Category | Winner | Rationale | Refs |
| Aviation | Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine, and Berry Pinshow | "for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats' ability to fly and also their ability to echolocate" | |
| Biology | Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka, and Katsutoshi Kino | "for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies" | |
| Chemistry | Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway | "for experiments to test whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content." | |
| Engineering design | Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal | "for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack" | |
| Literature | William B. Bean | "for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years" | |
| Nutrition | Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli | "for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza" | |
| Peace | Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann | "for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person's ability to speak in a foreign language" | |
| Pediatrics | Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp | "for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby's mother eats garlic" | |
| Physics | Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti | "for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness" | |
| Psychology | Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac | "for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists — or anyone else — that they are intelligent" | |