If You Want To Start Businesses, Will This Cat Poop Parasite Help?

What do you need to become an entrepreneur? A good idea? Dedication? Drive? How about some cat poop?

Yes, while the road to starting your own business may be littered with challenges, who knew that it could have anything to do with kitty litter? A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences found an interesting association between exposure to Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that can be found in cat feces, and interest in starting a business, with an emphasis on the word association. A team from the University of Colorado (Stefanie K. Johnson, Dana M. Calhoun, Marissa A. Beldon, and Pieter T. J. Johnson), the Frankfurt School of Management and Finance (Markus A. Fitza), Deusto University (Daniel A. Lerner), and the University of Hong Kong (Elsa T. Chan) conducted the three-part study.

The first part collected and analyzed data from 1495 students. Those students who tested positive in a saliva test for T. gondii exposure “were 1.4 times more likely to major in business and 1.7 times more likely to have an emphasis in ‘management and entrepreneurship’ over other business-related emphases,” according to the authors of the study.

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About the Author: DrStefanieKJohnson

Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Management at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and is particularly interested in the effects of unconscious biases in the evaluation of women and minorities, with the goal of finding ways to mitigate those biases. Dr. Johnson brings bias to light with an engaging and humorous approach to advanced scientific research, which has earned her numerous accolades and invitations to present her work at meetings around the world, including the White House for a 2016 summit on diversity in corporate America on National Equal Pay Day, and the 2016 Harvard Negotiation and Leadership Conference. She has published over 70 journal articles and book chapters in outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Psychology and The Academy of Management Journal. She has extensive consulting experience and has created and delivered leadership-development training with an emphasis on evidence-based practice. In recognition of her unique research, Dr. Johnson has been awarded nearly three million dollars in external funding to study leadership and create leadership development programs aimed at increasing safety. Media outlets featuring her work include: The Economist, Newsweek, Time, and CNN. Stefanie lives in the Boulder Bubble in Colorado with her Biology Professor husband, two young kiddos, and two old kitties.