[wordup] Men "stop thinking rationally" in the presence of "beautiful" women, hotornot.com

[Adam Shand]

Sorry for the weirdly formatted last couple posts, I'm still learning 
the quirks of OSX's Mail.app.  This one should be better.

Adam.

From: http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1071070578.html

Men "stop thinking rationally" in the presence of "beautiful" women, 
hotornot.com

Posted 12/10/2003 @ 9:36 AM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Discounting the future... we all do it. If you setup an analytical 
tension between the immediate fulfillment of wishes/wants/desires and 
the future benefits one may gain by not fulfilling them, one can see 
that humans (and indeed most animals) routinely chose the present over 
the future. Such analytical approaches then seek to evaluate whether or 
not the choice in favor of the present is rational or irrational. Using 
pictures from hotornot.com,researchers tested men and women's reactions 
to accepting prize money in the following scheme: they could accept a 
check for US$15-35 tomorrow, or they could wait and get paid US$50-75 
"at a variable point in the future." The kicker is that the students 
were shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex before 
being made to make a decision.

   Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures
   of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting
   of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they
   had made a rational decision. When male students were shown
   pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value
   of the reward in an "irrational" way - they would opt for
   the smaller amount of money available the next day rather
   than wait for a much bigger reward. Women, by contrast, made
   equally rational decisions whether they had been shown
   pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.

So, the men apparently would opt for the immediate award more often if 
they had just seen pictures of attractive women. Now we know what all 
the advertisers have known for years. All of this said, I think that 
experiments like this say less about humanity as some kind of rational 
machine than they say about science's presuppositions about what makes 
"good thought." Do you think, for example, that the same results would 
be achieved outside of a college environment, or if there was a more 
tangible difference in rewards? The upper limit of $35 versus the low 
limited of $50 for "delayed rewards" seems rather meager. Still, it's 
an interesting experiment, although it's not really clear what it 
means.