107 Results

Social Psychology & Human Behaviour

June 15, 2011

Power makes BOTH men and women misread sexual interest everywhere

Power May Increase Promiscuity : NPR

Anthony Weiner, John Edwards, Arnold Schwarzenegger — men behaving badly, right? It may be more complex than that. Research shows power causes men and women to take risks and imagine themselves as more attractive. New survey research shows that, given power, women are as likely as men to stray.

Power May Increase Promiscuity : NPR

 

Don’t women ever get involved in sex scandals? We put the question to a panel of pedestrians in downtown Washington. Here are Brendan McNamara, a legal assistant, and Debbie Wilcox, a visitor from Canada.

Mr. BRENDAN MCNAMARA (Legal Assistant): I don’t want to speculate, but I think that women have done it less.

Ms. DEBBIE WILCOX: I think it goes along with the culture and the society and the position of power and taking advantage of people that are not in a position of power.

VEDANTAM: So would you imagine that women would do the same thing in positions of power?

Ms. WILCOX: Never.

(Soundbite of laughter)

VEDANTAM: They’re right and they’re wrong. Power is the problem, but it turns out it is just as much a problem for women as for men.

 

Power May Increase Promiscuity : NPR

 

Mr. JORIS LAMMERS (Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University Professor): Whether they ever committed adultery, whether they foresee that they ever would engage in a adulterous relationship. And, yeah, we found it affects both men and women. The more they have power, the more they are likely to engage in infidelity.

VEDANTAM: Lammers found that the most powerful people in his survey were 30 percent more likely to have affairs than the least powerful people. The most powerful people were also having way more affairs. And this is not just about the Dutch.

Studies done in other places have shown the same correlation between adultery and power. And there is preliminary research that might explain why power increases infidelity. When you stick people inside a brain scanner and give them a fleeting sense of power, the way they view risks and rewards changes.

Mr. LAMMERS: So you can even see this in brain activation. If people feel powerful, and you can see that brain structure associated with positive things – with rewards – is just much more activated than the part that is steered towards preventing the bad things from happening.

VEDANTAM: So when you get a sense of power, you start to focus on all the things that could go right. And you get blinders on for all the things that could go wrong. But that’s not all.

Psychologist Jon Maner, at Florida State University, recently sat heterosexual college students down with an opposite sex partner. Maner found that when students were given a brief feeling of power, they were more likely to start flirting with the stranger sitting next to them. Take away the power, the flirting disappears – and it wasn’t just the men. Women given power behaved exactly the same.

Mr. JON MANER (Florida State University, Department of Psychology Professor): Power-holders tended to touch their subordinates more, they maintained more direct eye contact. They behaved in an overall more flirtatious manner.

VEDANTAM: Power also causes both men and women to see themselves as more attractive than they really are. And it makes perfectly innocuous comments from subordinates and strangers sound like come-ons. Volunteers with the power believe their lab partners were acting in sexual ways even when they were not, Maner said. In other words, when you say hello to someone, an ordinary person thinks you said hello. A powerful person thinks you meant hel-lo, and it doesn’t take much power to trigger this.

 

Power May Increase Promiscuity : NPR

 

Mr. MANER: I don’t think this is going to be limited to powerful politicians or CEOs at big companies by any means. I think this can happen in every day social interactions. In fact, in our own research, just giving people power over a small amount of money in a short laboratory interaction was sufficient to elicit this overestimation of sexual interest.

VEDANTAM: But none of these studies explain why there are so many more sex scandals among men. Our panel of pedestrians in Washington included Barley Bahla(ph), a local writer.

Powerful men tend to be at the center of these scandals, she said, because men are at the center of power in our society.

Ms. BARLEY BAHLA (Writer): Well, women in power have done some pretty inappropriate things. Think of Catherine the Great.

VEDANTAM: Catherine the Great was an 18th century Russian empress, one of the most powerful women in the history of the world. Over three decades, she took up with a slew of lovers. When she grew bored she discarded them by dipping into the national coffers to hush them up. Frankly, her sexual escapades make uploading dirty pictures to Twitter sound tame.

 

 

June 1, 2011

Gay brains similar to that of opposite sex

Symmetry Of Homosexual Brain Resembles That Of Opposite Sex, Swedish Study Finds

ScienceDaily (June 18, 2008) — Swedish researchers have found that some physical attributes of the homosexual brain resemble those found in the opposite sex, according to an article published online (June 16) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Symmetry Of Homosexual Brain Resembles That Of Opposite Sex, Swedish Study Finds

Some psychological tests have shown differences between men and women in the extent to which they employ the brain’s hemispheres in verbal tasks. Other research has hinted that homosexuals may exhibit the tendencies of the opposite sex in brain behavior unrelated to sexual activity.

Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, now report that the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women are slightly asymmetric—the right hemisphere is larger than the left—and the brains of gay men and straight women are not.

Positron emission tomography (PET) scans taken by the researchers also show that in connectivity of the amygdala (which is important for emotional learning), lesbians resemble straight men, and gay men resemble straight women. The researchers analyzed the brains of 90 subjects, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess brain volume and PET data partly gleaned from previous olfactory studies.

One possible interpretation of the connectivity pattern in straight men and lesbians is that the amygdala is wired for a greater fight-or-flight response, the authors say.

 

 

June 1, 2011

The Importance of Attractiveness Depends on Where You Live

The importance of attractiveness depends on where you live

ScienceDaily (Dec. 16, 2009) — Do good-looking people really benefit from their looks, and in what ways? A team of researchers from the University of Georgia and the University of Kansas found that yes; attractive people do tend to have more social relationships and therefore an increased sense of psychological well-being. This seems like common sense, and might be why we spend billions of dollars each year trying to become more attractive.

The importance of attractiveness depends on where you live

 

However, the study, published in this month’s issue of Personal Relationships, also determines that the importance of attractiveness is not universal; rather, it is determined by where we live.

The importance of attractiveness in everyday life is not fixed, or simply a matter of human nature. Instead, the impact of our attractiveness on our social lives depends on the social environment where we live. Attractiveness does matter in more socially mobile, urban areas (and from a woman’s point of view actually indicates psychological well-being), but it is far less relevant in rural areas. In urban areas individuals experience a high level of social choice, and associating with attractive people is one of those choices.

In other words, in urban areas, a free market of relationships makes attractiveness more important for securing social connections and consequently for feeling good. In rural areas, relationships are less about choice and more about who is already living in the community. Therefore, attractiveness is less likely to be associated with making friends and feeling good.

Furthermore, urban women need not have below average looks in order to experience a diminished sense of well-being and social life. Dr. Victoria C. Plaut and her team studied women at mid-life in the U.S. based on data related to their well-being, social connectedness, and their body attractiveness (assessed with a calculation of their waist-to-hip ratio). Plaut points out, “In the field of psychology, research results are generally seen as having a natural and universal applicability. This research suggests that this is far from being the case. Rather, the importance of attractiveness varies with certain sociocultural environments, and, if you think about it, urban environments are actually a relatively recent addition to human life.”

 

 

June 1, 2011

Evolutionary interpretation of how gender and sexual orientation affect human mate selection preferences

Evolutionary interpretation of how gender and sexual orientation affect human mate selection preferences

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2011) — In an article published online April 4 in the journal Behaviour, Howard Russock of the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Western Connecticut State University, compares mate preferences of men and women seeking same-sex versus opposite-sex mates, and compares these preferences to predictions from sexual selection theory.

Evolutionary interpretation of how gender and sexual orientation affect human mate selection preferences

Sexual selection and parental investment theory have been used to study mate selection for many years and for much of that time has been applied to humans, with the prediction that humans will follow the general mammalian pattern. One aspect of human mate selection that has received much less attention is that of same sex mate selection.

The present study used an analysis of 800 personal advertisements from print and online media to determine the mate selection criteria of four mating groups — males seeking females (MF), females seeking males (FM), males seeking males (MM) and females seeking females (FF). Consistent with results of earlier studies, heterosexual males (MF) in our study preferred significantly younger partners than heterosexual females (FM), offered physical attractiveness significantly less often than FM, sought resources significantly less often than FM and indicated a willingness to make a commitment significantly more often than FM.

Homosexual females (FF) differed from heterosexual females by the same four criteria and in the same direction as heterosexual males, in clear contrast to hypotheses suggesting that homosexuals only differ from heterosexuals of the same gender in choice of sexual object. Homosexual males (MM) differed from heterosexual males in only two criteria, both of which exhibited an exaggerated male pattern, possibly because MM are unaffected by the sexual strategies of females; MM sought attractiveness (even) more than MF and offered resources less than MF.

Homosexual men, thus, exhibited no evidence of selection on the mate preference characteristics predicted by sexual selection theory. In contrast, the proximate mate selection preferences of female homosexuals were consistent with the assumption that in their case procreation is irrelevant to mate selection.

 

 

June 1, 2011

Intelligence And Physical Attractiveness Both Impact Income

Intelligence And Physical Attractiveness Both Impact Income

ScienceDaily (May 16, 2009) — People looking for a good job at a good salary could find their intelligence may not be the only trait that puts them at the top of the pay scale, according to researchers. A new study finds attractiveness, along with confidence, may help job-seekers stand out to employers.

Intelligence And Physical Attractiveness Both Impact Income

“Little is known about why there are income disparities between the good-looking and the not-so-good-looking,” said the study’s lead author, Timothy Judge, PhD, of the University of Florida. “We’ve found that, even accounting for intelligence, a person’s feeling of self-worth is enhanced by how attractive they are and this, in turn, results in higher pay.”

Judge’s team analyzed data from the Harvard Study of Health and Life Quality, a national, longitudinal study. 

The study looked at 191 men and women between the ages of 25 and 75 who were interviewed three times six months apart starting in 1995. They answered questions about their household income, education and financial stresses and evaluated how happy or disappointed they were with their achievements up to that point. They completed several intelligence and cognitive tests and had their pictures taken. Several different people on the research team rated each person’s attractiveness relative to their age and gender. The raters were men and women of varying ages. The authors then calculated an average attractiveness score for each participant based on those ratings.

The researchers found that physical attractiveness had a significant impact on how much people got paid, how educated they were, and how they evaluated themselves. Basically, people who were rated good-looking made more money, were better educated and were more confident. But the effects of a person’s intelligence on income were stronger than those of a person’s attractiveness.

“We can be somewhat heartened by the fact that the effects of general intelligence on income were stronger than those of facial attractiveness,” said Judge. “It turns out that the brainy are not necessarily at a disadvantage to the beautiful, and if one possesses intelligence and good looks, then all the better.”

The research did show that good-looking people tend to think more highly of their worth and capabilities which, in turn, led to more money and less financial stress. But, the study’s authors note, these findings also should be a warning to employers who may subconsciously favor the more attractive. “It is still worthwhile for employers to make an effort to reduce the effects of bias toward attractive people in the workplace,” said Judge. One good means of doing this, according to Judge, is to rely on objective measures such as personality and ability tests.

However, Judge wrote, education and intelligence still had a greater payoff than good looks when it came to their effect on people’s level of income. He concluded that it could be more effective for people to build on important job skills and education before seeking the latest beauty treatments.