Men Stop Thinking Rationally Around Good Looking Women

from the well,-duh dept

I imagine this one won’t surprise very many people, but it appears that the old adage that men often… well, think with other parts of their body in the presence of a good looking woman may have now been proven true. Some researchers set out to compare the rational decision making process of men and women after looking at images of members of the opposite sex in varying degrees of attractiveness. After viewing an image, the participants were given the chance to earn $15 to $35 tomorrow or $50 to $75 at some variable point in the future. The men who had looked at good looking women were much more likely to go after the immediate satisfaction of having the smaller wad of cash tomorrow. All others thought through the issue rationally and took the large amount at a later date. What does all of this have to do with technology? Not all that much, but I found it amusing that the researchers used images from HotOrNot to represent the “attractive” and “not attractive” images that participants viewed. Of course, I can also see some using this study as yet another reason (as if there weren’t enough good ones already) why viewing porn at work is a bad idea (though, you could just as easily make the argument that it also means men shouldn’t be allowed to work around attractive women either).


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Comments on “Men Stop Thinking Rationally Around Good Looking Women”

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7 Comments
dorpus says:

Bayesian Inferences?

This study sounds incomplete. Did they consider:

1. What if men were shown pictures of really ugly women that made them puke? Would that not also have affected their rationality?

2. If really ugly, morbidly obese men were shown pictures of really pretty women, would the men have liked it or disliked it? Could really ugly men feel more attracted to plain women?

3. What was the variance of the “distant future”?
Was it a beta distribution or exponential distribution?

Here’s some women that are either really pretty or really ugly, depending on one’s point of view.

http://www.uglypeople.com/ugly_women.php?page=1

The Pub says:

Re: men not thinking around good looking women

I think that’s what women want anyway, else why go to all the trouble at the makeup mirror, at the drug store, at the plastic surgeon. Because if it’s true that most men don’t think with their real brains when it comes to good looking women, then women would be in big big trouble if men didn’t let the visual distract them. Then, not being able to rely on their looks to fool men, women would have to start improving their minds and their character. But then again, women wouldn’t like that… it would mean getting their butts away from Oprah and the Women’s Network and doing something meaningful in the world.

Oliver Wendell Jones (profile) says:

How much money was wasted on this?

Take $10 and go to any strip club. Anywhere.

Spend $5 to get in and $5 for a Coke and have a seat.

Within an hour you’ll be convinced that most men don’t think with their big brain – ever.

My girlfriend used to work at a club for a living and could easily bring home $350-500 per night just in ‘tips’ and (don’t tell her I said this) she’s not one of the best looking women there.

One girl we knew worked two nights every two weeks. That was her living. If she took home less than $800 a night that was a disaster. She averaged $1100 per night. Of course she had 2.2 liters of saline in each breast, that might have had something to do with it….

Paintbox says:

re. how men stop thinking rationally around a good

It’s not the women men see as attractive, not anymore anyway. It’s the women’s cosmetics, her fake breasts, the dye in her hair, the plucked eyebrows. That’s what men are being distracted by, the lie that women tell them every day– “I’m the product of my cosmetics… but please pretend I’m for real.”

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