THERE ARE many reasons why Mr Science Notebook doesn’t wear a wedding ring. Chiefly, when he tried one on, he thought it “felt funny”. He doesn’t really do bling.

I shall now have to warn him against hanging around Canadian supermarkets. For, in such places, social psychologists lurk unseen, noting the presence or absence of such jewellery among unwitting shoppers. From behind the frozen peas the psychologists have observed that people who don’t wear wedding rings are more neglectful of their charges than those wearing wedding bands.

The findings, by Andrew Harrell and colleagues at the University of Alberta, were presented at a conference this month and in a news release sensationally entitled: “Absence of wedding ring connected to parental neglect”. I can’t better the description of this utterly weird experiment, so I reprint it here . . . “862 caretaker-children combinations were furtively observed in 14 supermarkets in Edmonton. Caretaker neglect was measured according to how often the caretakers or their charges, estimated to be between one and seven years old, wandered out of sight or were more than 10ft away from each other — too far to prevent most accidents.” Leaving a kid in a trolley while dashing to a neighbouring aisle was a no-no, for example.

On average, 14 per cent of caretakers — with or without rings — lost sight of their charges at least once. But young, attractive adults without rings were particularly lax. Among women in this category, 19 per cent failed the vigilance test. Among the men, it was 25 per cent.

Dr Harrell’s conclusion? The lack of commitment to marriage, signified by unadorned fingers, extends to a laissez faire attitude to the kids. Harrell implies that these customers might have been shopping for more than just Shreddies, and might have been distracted by “an interest in establishing social, sexual or emotional ties outside of marriage . . .” And you thought that chap dithering by your trolley had just lost his way to the beer aisle!

Am I alone in finding this an excessive leap of imagination? Have you tried keeping a boisterous six-year-old within 10ft of you? Might the neglectful caretakers not have been parents? Dr Harrell’s team was not permitted to speak to shoppers, so we don’t know. That wasn’t the only methodological drawback. “A few children spotted us and would ask their parents ‘Why are those people following us?’,” Dr Harrell says. “Their carer would usually ignore them.”

If one wanted to do a serious study on whether unmarried parents are more neglectful of their children than married ones, why the supermarket espionage? After all, in the pantheon of perilous environments, the home reigns supreme. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, children regularly burn, scald or poison themselves, start fires or fall down stairs or out of windows. They are treated in A&E departments, or by GPs, both of whom have access to family records.

Dr Harrell holds his hands up: “You’re right. We had to make do with the limitations of this study but we hope to look at such things in future.” Meanwhile, he stands by the unpopular thesis that unwed couples are probably more lax than marrieds: “Sometimes the truth hurts, and if it’s predictive of injury and death, then we have to say it.”

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