Birth Control Pills Affect Women's Taste in Men (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Birth Control Pills Affect Women's Taste in Men (2008)

scientificamerican.com

50 pointstimr13 comments

My general complaint about journalism regarding these sorts of studies: Normally the study did in fact find the effect the journalist reports on, and the effect was indeed statistically significant, however, 9 times out of 10, the effect is tiny. Frequently the effect doesn't affect all people the same (e.g., in clinical trials, even when a treatment is statistically significant, some people under the treatment effect will get worse rather than better). And yet, even though these effects are tiny and not universal, the journalist almost always reports it as though it is some ironclad rule of human behavior.

I have no idea how strong the birth control pill effect is; maybe it is indeed a strong one. But this sort of reporting leaves you absolutely no way of knowing. And I have a problem with that.

Huh, that's funny. I read your comment and thought, "That's not right - the article has hedges in there, 'this may cause xyz to some extent' or some such." And then I went back and re-read it, and nope, you're right. It states what are probably minor effects with rather large certainty. It's like I was mentally adding the hedges based on the context (new study, journalism, speculation at the end). But it was definitely less hedged than I processed.

Here you go (the original paper):

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1652/2715...

The newspaper misinterprets the study's conclusion. The study only says that pill affects odour preference and that "if odour plays a role in human mate choice, our results suggest that contraceptive pill use could disrupt disassortative mate preferences." Clearly, that's a big "if" and it doesn't seem to be discussed in the article.

PS: I live in Japan, and reading the newspaper my first thought was that at least there's some upside to the fact that Japanese women don't use the pill...

It's not that big an if — I'd be very surprised if odor played an insignificant role in attraction, especially given how important odors and pheromones are in other organisms.

See http://www.ejog.org/article/S0301-2115(04)00474-9/abstract if you are on a university campus (otherwise it won't let you access the full text).

Short term? (the "hookup phase") Maybe not, what with daily showers and deodorants and what not.

Long term? It likely plays an important role.

I've heard it cited that marriage counselors very commonly hear "Can't stand the way they smell" as a complaint.

Just as an anecdote, I took a class on human sexual evolution about four years ago. Our professor said he was so convinced that this phenomenon was real that when his daughter got engaged, he convinced her to go off the pill for a month to ensure that she still loved her fiance (she did).

Anecdotally, my ex-girlfriend started taking the pill around the start of the two years we dated (to regulate her cycle, not because we started dating, though it was...convenient). She's off it now, and looking back on it, she thinks that the effect it had on her mood/personality contributed to our breakup (we're still friends, in case that's not obvious, and have discussed this).

I guess if your marriage is built more upon sexual attraction to your significant other than upon other kinds of compatibility, then this news would be rather shocking to you.

Or if you want to have immunocompetant children.

[2008]

not exactly news

I thought this was going to be much dirtier than it was.

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