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Toilet paper when used with a toilet roll holder with a horizontal axle parallel to the floor and also parallel to the wall has two possible orientations: the toilet paper may hang ''over'' (in front of) or ''under'' (behind) the roll; if perpendicular to the wall, the two orientations are right-left or near-away. The choice is largely a matter of personal preference, dictated by habit. In surveys of US consumers and of bath and kitchen specialists, 60–70 percent of respondents prefer ''over''.〔This paragraph summarizes material in the body; details and citations are found below. For definitions of the choices, see Preliminaries. Habit is discussed in Arguments. See Survey results for statistics.〕 While many people consider this topic unimportant, some hold strong opinions on the matter. Advice columnist Ann Landers said that the subject was the most responded to (15,000 letters in 1986) and controversial issue in her column's history. Defenders of either position cite advantages ranging from aesthetics, hospitality, and cleanliness to paper conservation, the ease of detaching individual squares, and compatibility with a recreational vehicle or a cat. Some writers have proposed connections to age, sex, or political philosophy, and survey evidence has shown a correlation with socioeconomic status.〔For pros and cons, including RVs and cats, see Arguments; for celebrities and experts, including Ann Landers, see Noted preferences; for theories, see Themes.〕 A generic answer is that it should hang the way the person doing the roll changing prefers. Solutions range from compromise, to using separate dispensers or separate bathrooms entirely, or simply ignoring the issue altogether. One man advocates a plan under which his country will standardize on a single forced orientation, and at least one inventor hopes to popularize a new kind of toilet roll holder which swivels from one orientation to the other.〔The enthusiast, Bill Jarrett, and the inventor, Curtis Batts, are described in Solutions.〕 ==Context and relevance== In the article "Bathroom Politics: Introducing Students to Sociological Thinking from the Bottom Up", Eastern Institute of Technology sociology professor Edgar Alan Burns describes some reasons toilet paper politics is worthy of examination. On the first day of Burns' introductory course in sociology, he asks his students, "Which way do you think a roll of toilet paper should hang?" In the following fifty minutes, the students examine why they picked their answers, exploring the social construction of "rules and practices which they have never consciously thought about before". They make connections to larger themes of sociology, including gender roles, the public and private spheres, race and ethnicity, social class, and age. Moreover, Burns argues that there is an additional lesson: Burns' activity has been adopted by a social psychology course at the University of Notre Dame, where it is used to illustrate the principles of Berger and Luckmann's 1966 classic ''The Social Construction of Reality''. Similar everyday topics that have been used to awaken the sociological imagination include games of tic-tac-toe, violations of personal space, the rules of walking, and the etiquette of which urinals men choose in public restrooms.〔. The previous topics are discussed in the section "Finding Sociology in everyday places: a review".〕 Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, classifies the choice of toilet paper orientation under "tastes, preferences, and interests" as opposed to either values or "attitudes, traits, norms, and needs". Other personal interests include one's favorite cola or baseball team. Interests are an important part of identity; one expects and prefers that different people have different interests, which serves one's "sense of uniqueness". Differences in interests usually lead at most to teasing and gentle chiding. For most people, interests don't cause the serious divisions caused by conflicts of values; a possible exception is what Peterson calls "the 'get a life' folks among us" who elevate interests into moral issues. Morton Ann Gernsbacher, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, compares the orientation of toilet paper to the orientation of cutlery in a dishwasher, the choice of which drawer in a chest of drawers to place one's socks, and the order of shampooing one's hair and lathering one's body in the shower. In each choice, there is a prototypical solution chosen by the majority, and it is tempting to offer simplistic explanations of how the minority must be different. She warns that neuroimaging experiments—which as of 2007 were beginning to probe behaviors from mental rotation and facial expressions to grocery shopping and tickling—must strive to avoid such cultural bias and stereotypes. In his book ''Conversational Capital'', Bertrand Cesvet gives toilet paper placement as an example of ritualized behavior—one of the ways designers and marketers can create a memorable experience around a product that leads to word-of-mouth momentum. Cesvet's other examples include shaking a box of Tic Tacs and dissecting Oreo cookies. Sometimes toilet paper is simply entertaining. In between songs at a concert, John Hiatt will sometimes tell the tale of his wife switching her preference. Broadcaster Jim Bohannon, who once spent an hour on toilet paper orientation, explains that such issues are good for talk radio: "It is an interactive medium, a certain kind of clash, it doesn't have to be a violent clash, but at least a disagreement would certainly be at the top of the list. It has to be something that's of general interest." There is a difficulty in the medium of television: on the major American networks NBC and CBS, as of 1987, toilet paper was not allowed to be shown hanging next to the toilet. The 1970s sitcom ''All in the Family'' was the first show to include a discussion of toilet paper, when Archie yelled at Meathead for hanging the paper ''under''.〔This is described as a "first" by . The substance of the argument is mentioned in .〕 In a 1995 episode of ''The Simpsons'', "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily", the children are confiscated by Child Protective Services, who hand Marge a note citing her home as a "squalid hellhole" where the toilet paper is "hung in improper overhand fashion". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Toilet paper orientation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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