Men Take More Risks When Pretty Women Are Around
livescience.com
livescience.com
You're quite the dick, aren't you? But that's OK, because you're so smart. It's OK to be a dick if you're smart.
Was it the guys or the girl(s) who died most of the time?
Did they rule out the guys trying to protect the girl?
They are entirely logical assumptions to make, but if you're trying to show something you shouldn't assume.
Your second question doesn't really make sense. First, there's no "protecting" someone from an avalanche. In a slide, you're looking at kilotons of frozen water moving towards you at a speed limited only by gravity and the slope of the mountain face it's falling down. If you're lucky, you're "only" buried in something whose density upon settling approaches that of concrete, and not carried into the trees at speeds that will pulp you on impact.
Moreover, when you're riding out of bounds, you take your runs one at a time, precisely because of the avalanche risk. If there is a slide, the rest of the group will come looking for you once it has subsided. The odds of finding one person buried in an avalanche are bad enough; looking for more than one at a time pretty well guarantees someone's not coming home that day -- or ever again.
You're right, my mistake.
Gotcha.
I believe there could be an XKCD graph in this for frequency of sex correlated against infrequency of genius.
The journal:
http://spp.sagepub.com/current.dtl
The abstract:
http://spp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/57
The paper (pdf):
Interesting similar findings that men take more risks when playing women in chess (when looking at ~1.4 million games):
For male players the probability of choosing a solid strategy is about 1.3 percent lower when facing a female opponent compared to a male opponent
Additionally, women chess players appear to be more risk averse in general.
Though the article wasn't too specific, it seems to me that it works because the risky stuff makes people stand out. Success in higher risk endeavors is much more eye-catching than success in the mundane. You see identical behavior in many other areas: startups that take a risk and succeed are more likely to get funding, anyone that does something unique (a risk itself) is rewarded heavily if they succeed.
I doubt it has anything to do with testosterone, and much more to do with perceived reward. Sure, that can cause an increase in testosterone, but it's definitely not required to do so to exhibit this behavior.
Lurk more, or do whatever you have to do to increase the quality of your comments.
>They take more risks because it works.
Agreed.
>I doubt it has anything to do with testosterone, and much more to do with perceived reward
This makes it seem like a conscious decision, which I don't buy. "Pretty woman will like me" is just one more factor in the risk/reward calculation, which is made subconsciously.
I would say it's more likely that testosterone is one variable in the risk/reward calculation, and is released in the presence of pretty women (among other things) because that turns out to be what works.
Was this research really required? They had a nice experiment setup, but didn't seem to bother with different age ranges, sexual orientation or any other parameters that might yield actually interesting results.
1) Just because something is obvious doesn't mean it shouldn't be researched. For instance, for a long time it was obvious that light things fall slower than heavy things.
2) I'm not sure what you mean by "really required". In the literal sense, no research is "really required". In the non-literal sense, it's better to have data about something than to not have data about it.
3) I'm not entirely certain why whether you find the results interesting or not is something the researchers should take into account. What's more, adding more independent variables to the experiment would complicate things unnecessarily.
And sure common sense sometimes is wrong and it must be corrected, but I don't think this case was a priority.
"He challenged himself to describe in equations the wobbling movement of a spinning plate being tossed in the air by a student in a Cornell cafeteria. After much effort, he was able to show that, consistent with his observations, for a small degree of wobble, a one-to-two ratio between the wobble and spin was indeed valid. When Feynman excitedly described his results to Bethe, the other scientist listened with interest but wanted to know their practical value. [...] Ironically, he found that the spinning-plate movement he had studied just for fun also had application to the electron-spin problem."
It's about creating an accurate model of the world and universe. I never saw the point of being caustic against any kind of research.
Just because something seems obvious, doesn't mean its right or that the science behind it won't lead to something more interesting.
I've wondered if this trait in males is the historical cause of the Knight-in-Shining-Armour legends. If a man sees a woman in trouble, is he really more likely to save her?
There's already a strong correlation between near-death experiences and mistaken love (apparently extreme fear and lust have the same biological pathway, which is too Freudian for me to touch at 9pm), so Sir Knight saving the lady would almost undoubtedly get some action in the bed, which fulfils the reproduction criteria (pre-condom era) for gene spreading.