Sometimes I think the “Science for Choads” section would be better called the “Science Reporting for Choads”, but that would be too narrow to include all the people that make science-y sounding claims with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Via Echidne, the latest “science confirms all your gender prejudices” story is particularly nasty in terms of implication and timing.
WASHINGTON - A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.
The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.
“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.
Remember: The capitalist patriarchy can do no wrong. That is the first rule. Everything that goes wrong is due to effeminate liberals or actual women. The war would have gone smashing if not for the effeminate peace movement that stabbed the country in the back, just like a bitch would. Hell, why “stab in the back”? Why not “poison the eggs” to drive home the point? The inevitable abuses when you give men power over women—rape, domestic violence—women’s fault, of course, for starting shit. Women’s inequalities? Women’s choice.
But it’s going to be hard to explain how a male-dominated financial sector that gambled and deregulated our economy to shreds is actually innocent, because it’s some bitches that did it. But here’s your proof: These guys would have sober, cautious, hard-working members of society who give back instead of getting greedy if women didn’t flaunt the boobage. Housing crisis is all about those terrible women with the sex.
So, we have a finance professor who concludes that this is all the proof you need that women’s sexuality is to blame for everything. And in case you didn’t get the point, men’s stupidity when it comes to the all-powerful female sexuality is to blame for our current economic situation—you know, instead of greed and deregulation and engineering the tax structure to drain the middle class of wealth and the war.
The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men’s evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women, said Kevin McCabe, professor of economics, law and neuroscience at George Mason University, who wasn’t part of the study.
“Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there’s a downside to it, what we’re seeing right now in the economy,” McCabe said.
The truth appears to be more mundane, and is actually expressed in the story, before it’s quickly covered up with more convenient quotes that put all the blame on the sexy, sexy ladies.
Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, says it’s all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial decisions. The trigger doesn’t have to be sex — it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.
“It didn’t matter if the sexy woman didn’t tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game,” Knutson said. “What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions.”
My emphasis. It’s worth noting, by the way, that the sample size was 15 college-aged men, who are a lot younger than the titans of finance, and they didn’t bother to test women, saying they didn’t know what pictures aroused women. (Which strikes me as pure bullshit—actual sexuality researchers have shown for long time that while women might be put off intellectually by porn, either because of the contempt for women in much of it or because women know they’re not supposed to like it or else they get called sluts, images of sex tend to get women as aroused as men.) But if you read a slightly less sensational version of the story, it turns out that the findings aren’t so much that men get stupid when they see naked women—making it easy to blame women for our current financial crisis—but that once the pleasure parts of the brain are activated, people are more willing to engage in risky behavior. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone that’s caved and eaten a donut once smelled while on a diet.
Knutson and his colleagues studied heterosexual male undergraduate college students. The images the men viewed were intended to stimulate an emotional response. Erotic images were used to elicit a positive response, snakes and spiders to prompt a negative response, and office supplies to trigger a neutral response. …..
“If you go to the casinos, people are wearing skimpy costumes, they’re giving you free alcohol, there are bells and lights and things like that, which don’t necessarily seem related to the odds of the gambling,” Knutson said. “But these are cues that might activate brain regions that encourage risk-taking and therefore get people to gamble more.”
Don’t forget the cheap food!
What the evidence points to is not some kind of evo psych excuse to put all the blame for male risk-taking on the shoulders of women for the high crime of existing, but something much more mundane than any one who likes to gamble could tell you—gambling is fun. And anyone who’s made a mistake ever could probably tell you that the promise of pleasure does have a capacity to overwhelm rational thought. You don’t really need to introduce erotic pictures into the equation to demonstrate that gambling is risky precisely because the pleasure parts of the brain overrule the rational parts, which is why the cardinal rule of gambling is to bring no more money to the table than you’re willing to lose, and to make that decision long before the excitement of gambling kicks in.
But what about the stockbroker they interviewed for the AP? Isn’t he an expert in the link between sex and financial risk-taking?
The results of the study jibe with the real life on the trading floor, said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago commodities floor trader and current analyst at Alaron Trading Corp.
“I’m not shocked that it may be part of the deal,” Flynn said Friday. “When you talk about all the euphemisms for trading (on the floor), they can be used for sex as well.”
(”Massaging the market” and “hardcore” were about the cleanest that he and his colleagues could come up with.)
He hasn’t actually argued that men walk around sporting erections on the trading floor, mind you. What these quotes show is not that he and his colleagues conflate sex and trading so much as they are sexists who deliberately use sexualized language to send the message that theirs is a boys-only club and women are not welcome. Even if a woman is at ease with sexual frankness, she still won’t be able to play along, because I’ll bet most of the terms he’s using are metaphors that put the trader or analyst in the position of a sexual penetrator, and women can’t really claim to penetrate anything metaphorically without sounding a little stupid.
The researchers want to do more studies, and actually put women under the microscope. Want to bet that when they come up with evidence that women enjoy gambling, that won’t get a shiny spot in the AP science reporting? I’m willing to take that one up, because even though I’m not a college age boy just exposed to pornography, I do like to gamble.
49 Responses to “Using 15 college age boys and some reactionary reporting, we are able to blame the coming depression on boobage”
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Wait, I thought it was the result of unchecked greed and under/non-regulated markets for mortgage backed securities. Silly me.
Well, and is it really “risk-taking” when the risk is mainly put on the little guy, whereas the big guys who run everything can count on a govt bailout?
Thanks again for an excellent catch - while I see sexism when you turn the rock over and point it out, my filters (as a male) aren’t as finely-tuned.
As Wall Street is the driving half of the mutant siamese twins that is the Republican party, what does that say for the sex-denying Religious Reich?
Of course, tittilation and suppression are part of the whole shebang (heh I said she-bang) that makes the repressed fundie tick…
(And re the market? Socialize risk, privatize profit! And to really make money needs a monopoly!)
Atmosphere of casinos encourages people to spend more money? And in other news, water wet.
Why is it women’s fault that men are stupid?
Seriously. I cannot get from “men take dumb risks when they see pictures of sexy women” to “women are responsible for bad financial decisions.” To me it screams “men are irresponsible actors who think with their dicks and if you want financial responsibility, put women in charge.”
I have never understood why evo-psych conclusions that men do dumb things because they are so overwhelmed by women can *ever* be interpreted as “it’s women’s fault.” It’s so obviously *male* inferiority that causes this. I mean, if women made stupid decisions on the basis of cute pictures of babies, would it be babies’ fault? No, it would be explained that the female maternal instinct overrides our ability to do logic. So, if the male instinct for sex overrides their ability to do logic, WHY ARE THEY IN CHARGE OF EVERYTHING?
Of course you’re right that it’s bad science, and the truth is anyone gets distracted when presented with something that activates the pleasure center… but if it *was* true, how can anyone take it as “It’s women’s fault” rather than “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them?” I mean, isn’t evidence that men think with their dicks incontrovertible proof that women are superior to men and should be in charge of everything, since, lacking dicks, we *always* think rationally?
I think this is why I like evo-psych better than most feminists do. Most feminists read an article about how men get stupid when they look at women and think “This is blaming women for men’s stupidity!” I look at it and say “This is attempting to prove that men are too dumb to trust with your money, thus implying that your financial advisor should be a woman!” They’re both science for choads, but one appeals to the female chauvinist choad in me.
Alara, I dislike evo psych because it’s bad science. But you’re right that it’s amazing how often they determine men should rule while men are stupid. It’s because the counter-theory is that women are naturally submissive.
It’s all bullshit. My main problem with it is not that it says stuff I don’t want to hear. It’s that it’s bullshit. It’s utter nonsense in service of a misogynist agenda. The truth is nothing that I fear, because you can open your eyes and look around and see the reality that women and men are equal but just artificially made unequal.
Wow there’s a whole lot wrong with the AP article and this study in general. First off, the study isn’t claiming that sex is “what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles”, it’s saying that outside stimulation, like sexual pictures, can stimulate risky behavior.
Second, I tend to question the validity of any “scientific” study that only has 15 test subjects. Did they even have a neutral group that wasn’t getting stimulated by anything? This doesn’t really seem to be science so much as a “hey I bet this would be cool to try” experiment.
Third, were the test subjects given money to bet or were they actually risking their own money. I’m going to take a lot more “risk” gambling with pretend money on a blackjack game on my computer than I would with real money in a casino. If they aren’t gambling their own money, than the study isn’t really studying risk-taking behavior, is it?
Finally, I think you missed the most misogynist portion of the article. Specifically:
Classy.
Despite all that’s wrong with this article and study, I have to disagree with you about it blaming women for the actions of the men. How I or any other man reacts when presented with a stimulus, be it a picture of a woman or a car or chocolate, isn’t the responsibility of the stimulus, it’s the responsibility of the man.
I cannot get from “men take dumb risks when they see pictures of sexy women” to “women are responsible for bad financial decisions.” To me it screams “men are irresponsible actors who think with their dicks and if you want financial responsibility, put women in charge.”
to say THAT would be pointing out that the Evo-Psych Emperor has no clothes, never did, and likely never will.
also: blaming the risk-taker for being an idiot, instead of blaming the “stimulus” for being, uh, stimulating, would leave those poor boys with their “Modesty quiz” alone, in the basement, with Internet and nothing to do…and we all know where THAT would lead.
straight to Satan.
Wait, what was that about having a need ‘in an evolutionary sense’ for money? *blink* Silly me, I didn’t realize that the genetic survival of our proto-human ancestors was dependent on currency! We anthropologists must be WAY behind on that area of research.
Why do I get the impression that evo-psych researchers don’t know a damn thing about evolution? Oh, that’s right–because they don’t.
“But you’re right that it’s amazing how often they determine men should rule while men are stupid. It’s because the counter-theory is that women are naturally submissive.”
But, what about living on the savage savanna? And hunting the woolly mammoth! And inventing fire! Where would we be without the awesome power of manliness?
As a male, I am in the iron grip of The Testosterone Monster…but, naturally that also makes a great and powerful leader! And now I’m a financial genius as well! Hoorah!
…
The first thing you learn about science is to avoid reaching a conclusion before you design your experiment(s) and before you have “all” the data. Behavioral science is especially prone to problems of bias in experiment design and reporting of results.
If you go looking for something, especially in people, the odds are good you will find it - some way or another…
You know, if you go around in the areas where native aboriginal peoples live off the land, I bet you could find huge stacks of prehistoric money hidden in caves and under rocks.
That’s because, ““You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” . Just a simple fact you know!
Money and “women.” Not money and sex, or money and pleasure. Because women = sex, or so it goes if you get laid so rarely that the mere thought of femininity in any form gives you an erection.
I always wondered why women tucked their money in their bras…
That Burnham guy is exactly what is wrong with evo psych. Basically, they take an idealized version of evolution (what is possible) that is not empirical (what is actual). Then they apply game theory to it. And then they get an empty result that they can read their own ideology into it.
If you get into it, the evo psych people know *something* about evolution, but they only know about the kind of experiments that can happen in idealized conditions that never actually happen in nature (nearly infinite population size in which you can test all strategies/traits against all other strategies/traits on average). When you get populations like this, you are epistemically warranted to make averages across the population that would be outrageous in a real population. This allows them to reduce evolution to game theory, which is an idealization itself: if we were all instrumentally rational and operated strictly for individual benefit, in situation X we would do Y. But then watch the magic switcheroo that enables researchers to study 15 college guys, tie it into a just-so story about cavemen, and extrapolate for all of humanity. Watch cloooosellllly … there it goes! Mix all this together with a whole bunch of specious reasoning, reactionary politics, and you get ECONOMISTS(!!!!) writing about evolution in a way that completely ignores the structural causes of behavior that their idealizations made invisible.
Hey scientists, why don’t you get down to business and reclaim your discipline from these anti-empiricist fools!? This does more damage to Darwinism than ID ever will.
“I always wondered why women tucked their money in their bras…”
Shake your money-maker?…
I haven’t followed the link, but from your quotes, I don’t see anything about blaming women or excusing men.
Unless I missed something, all I read is that sex and money are related. Which really didn’t require a study to know that.
Notice how no actual biologists appear to be involved in this “evolutionary” study.
Sometimes my alma mater embarrasses me.
Not knowing what kind of pictures, if any, would affect women? Lame. Solved with a modicum of googling.
Having taken a psych class at Stanford, I’d be willing to be that this guy simply got 15 undergraduates from Psych 101 to look at pix. Psych 101 undergrads are required to “volunteer” for 10 hours worth of grad school experiments.
So those 15 college-aged boys are a rarefied subset of young, privileged American male in the first place.
And if the effect isn’t any different than if stimulated by chocolate, why the evo psych shit in the first place? I fail to see how any gender-specific results can be discovered when only one gender is studied. There’s no way to make a legitimate conclusion–either how it affects women or how it affects humans in general (seeing how half of humans are female).
Sir, you’re being obtuse. The study didn’t actually show that sex and money are related. It showed that when people’s pleasure centers are lit up—and they can be lit up by anything pleasurable, of which sex is only one thing, and contrary to the implications of the story, men and women both have pleasure centers that are lit up by sex, food, winning, etc.—then people are more willing to take risks.
But that’s not how the story was reported. The story was, “Men are such suckers for sex that they’ll take financial risks, ergo we can blame our bad economy on sex, i.e. women.” In the hands of the audience—and watch, this will happen if this gets picked up by the pundits—the implication will be that men run financial districts because they like to gamble because of Teh Sex, with the implication being that women are not in charge not because of discrimination, but because we don’t like sex. All bullshit.
“In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”
I thought you needed to get the sugar first.
I thought you needed to get the sugar first.
The cheese stands alone.
What’s striking about the research is that it is geared to measure the response of the reptilian part of the brain. There are no surprises there, we already know well the dynamics of pleasure and pain.
What these experiments usually seem to lack is any measure of the response of the frontal lobes,
i.e., the discerning and decision-making parts of the brain.
What if the experiment was designed to ascertain decisions about gambling with one’s own money (as you described in the wise adage about never bringing more to the table than you are willing to lose)?
What if the experiment was designed to assess people’s moral and ethical compass if say, they were asked about their gambling strategy when bankrolled with someone else’s money, yet their winnings would be tied to the value of the dollars in their own pocket?
It seems that the research methods are only as good as the level of reasoning that is scoped out for observation & measurement, i.e., measure for reptile reaction, that’s what you get; measure for higher order thought, that’s where the differences emerge — not so easily homogenized, nor easily generalized.
What is nefarious and insidious about this kind of research is that it reflects back to humans their lesser origins. Its pervasiveness in the media seems to have a reinforcing effect, suggesting that we are right to not rise above our basest instincts.
Yet we have been endowed with so much more (reflection and deliberation, higher order processes). This is where social responsibility takes place. Where empathy and connection to a greater whole resides. But scientists tend to shy away from it because it is that much more difficult to quantify (less certain results are less certain to get published, no?)
Kudos to you Amanda. This is absolutely spot on writing & critique.
Just adding 2 cents about the GIGO aspect of the research itself.
Junk science is destroying this country, from Intelligent Design to evo-psych to MBA logic to Bioshock Objectivism. We appear to be having a Bunk Revolution to balance out all the scientific progress made in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And, Sirkowski, let us not forget that the end of the logical line here is the burkha. If women are causing risk-taking with thier hypnotic boobage, then they should COVER IT UP AND STAY HOME, for the good of society!!
Yet another reason to hate evopsych: it’s shamefully eurocentric. Well, not even totally eurocentric, since if you go back “hundreds of thousands of years” (the magic number to prove this trait is irrevocably ingrained) or even just a thousand or so years, you find a number of civilizations that are matriarchal and/or communal.
That part of history is disappeared in this narrative. Instead you get claims like this:
“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area.”
and this,
“The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men’s evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women.”
which don’t even make sense together, since one is claiming money has been a need for as long as bodies to fuck (i.e. women), and the other is claiming that both needs go back long before money was even invented. But those claims especially don’t make sense when you consider matriarchies.
“In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”
Because “you” of course are a heterosexual male. Only straight men qualify for “proper person” status and get to get money or power.
And, Sirkowski, let us not forget that the end of the logical line here is the burkha. If women are causing risk-taking with thier hypnotic boobage, then they should COVER IT UP AND STAY HOME, for the good of society!!
In this, at least, fundamentalist Islam is far more consistent than most fundie Christer doctrine. If you’re going to leap around yelling, “FEAR TEH BOOBIES!!” then the logical position on clothing for female believers is the burkha.
The Jebusite approach is having the cake and eating it, too. You get to ogle the goods while denouncing them, much like you get free-market capitalism with corporate welfare.
I always read that people raised in Eastern cultures are better able to deal with contradiction than Westerners, via Buddhism and the like. But a good segment of our culture seems to be living with contradiction just fine, simply by turning off their brains, grabbing their cranks and picking the pocket of the guy next to them in the church pew.
I was really waiting for some “expert” just to come up and say that this was due to reduced blood flow to the brain caused by male arousal.
“men’s evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women”
Women were mostly gatherers, which brought in most of the food. Men were mostly hunters, which brought in less food because it’s more reliable to grow plants than to try and kill a mammoth. Therefore, “men hunt women gather” does not translate into “men provide, women mind babies and home.” Why do evolutionary psychologists not understand this?
Since this is pretty much exactly what happened in our markets — hedge fund managers speculating with other people’s money that was tied to their own profits — I ‘d be fascinated to see what the results would be.
When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.
Seems to me the obvious conclusion is “somebody needs to get laid”…
No surprise there. IME, economists have a greater tendency vis-a-vis other disciplines to either 1) reduce everything to a question germane to their own expertise or 2) when unable to pull off #1, style themselves as experts on non-economic subjects anyway.
Cool. One more argument why you men should stay home in the kitchen and not worry your pretty little heads about things like finance. We women will take care of it all. It’s for your own protection, of course. We know you can’t control your impulses.
And this isn’t oppression, guys. Oh no. It’s biology!
Now, run along and make your wife a sandwich.
/snark
Secondhand at least, it seems that the reactions of a dozen or so frat-boy types are (as Amanda suggests in her closing paragraphs) way closer to those of the “titans of finance” than anyone would like to think. Why else would it be that the trading firms are always the ones hit with hostile-environment suits, or that when some catastrophe makes the headlines, the traders are the first ones firing off (ahem) tasteless jokes about it to their entire address books?
These guys may not be very bright, but they’re great in the male-vs-male pecking order games.
So who is going to tell Barney Frank to forget the new financial regulations and start putting Depo Provera in Wall Street’s water coolers?
Amanda, seems to me to you’re blaming the messenger for not writing the report in a idiot-proof way. I say it’s unfair, you say I’m obtuse; but whatever. e_e
You know, every time they do some bullshit study showing that men and women are different, they frame it as women being worse at things. A study on spatial relationships gets tagged with a headline like “WOMEN SUCK AT DRIVING” and one on what careers women have becomes “WOMEN JUST LOOOOOVE SERVICE INDUSTRY JOBS.” But here we have a study that say that men, when exposed to porn, do stupid things. Now, if the study actually means anything (a sample size of 15? Are you f’n kidding me? My undergrad psych department requires bigger sample sizes for student research than that), it should, by all rights be headlined with “MEN NOT TO BE TRUSTED WITH MONEY, DECISIONS.”
What’s the headline on this? “Sex and financial risk linked in brain.” No mention of the fact that it’s linked in the male brain, no mention of the fact that it means that the researchers concluded that men are big dumb animals that ought not to be trusted with pointy objects lest they see a tit and stab their best friend.
“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,”
And yet the researcher talking about this is a woman. It boggles the mind.
Well, not even totally eurocentric, since if you go back “hundreds of thousands of years” (the magic number to prove this trait is irrevocably ingrained) or even just a thousand or so years, you find a number of civilizations that are matriarchal and/or communal.
Actually the Matriarchal Past is almost as mythical as this “paleolithic man provided the food and women stayed home” nonsense. You don’t need to posit past matriarchies to know that the conclusions are poor, since risk-taking and sex are not restricted to men in any kind of society.
“lest they see a tit and stab their best friend” - spitting green tea now
Most ’studies’ that get airtime in the mainstream media are PR stunts, created on demand for a corporation or think tank by PR companies and their affiliated labs/scientists. Studies that have actual scientific value usually only get heard about by scientists who read the litterature, since they rot in specialized papers while the idiots assigned to “Science Reporting” publish another article about the health benefits of drinking a glass of wine each day.
Hey scientists, why don’t you get down to business and reclaim your discipline from these anti-empiricist fools!? This does more damage to Darwinism than ID ever will.
Because the pure bullshit guys aren’t showing up anywhere real scientists play, and as for science reporting, after the real scientist talks to the reporter, he can’t control the spin. Just like anyone else. Most wouldn’t prioritize proof-reading an advance copy of the article even if the reporter offered. Until they got burned, that is.
Sex - check
Risk taking - check
Aggression - check
Stupid decisions - check
Could these scientists have discovered testosterone?
This is Not News.
Several people have offered very valid critiques of the study’s methodology–namely, the very small and very male sample. The answer to these criticisms, and it’s certainly an imperfect one, is this: fMRI research is HELLA EXPENSIVE to conduct. 15-20 subjects is not unusual, and because testing is so pricey, you shoot for a sample that is most likely to give you results of some kind with as little noise in the data as possible. (we routinely exclude left-handers, anybody on psychotropic medication, anybody too old or young…)
So if Knutson and colleagues didn’t think they could cleanly and reliably elicit arousal from female participants, they likely decided to test their hypotheses with only male participants in order to have the best shot at finding an effect in the brain data. Then, assuming they saw interesting, robust and interpretable patterns of activation, they could expand the study with a mixed-sex sample.
Is this problematic, given psychology’s history of the white male as normative in research? You betcha. But as a cognitive neuroscientist and feminist who does very similar research, I think the experimental shortcomings here are due to the lack of funding for science research (unless it can be used by the department of defense!) that keeps us from being able to do the most comprehensive and representative studies possible.
In this, at least, fundamentalist Islam is far more consistent than most fundie Christer doctrine. If you’re going to leap around yelling, “FEAR TEH BOOBIES!!” then the logical position on clothing for female believers is the burkha.
The Jebusite approach is having the cake and eating it, too. You get to ogle the goods while denouncing them, much like you get free-market capitalism with corporate welfare.
Yes and no; it’s out there in Christian form, too. All you have to do is look at the ‘modest clothing’ movement and the fundie rants about women as ’stumbling blocks’ to male virtue. Honestly, let these asshats get enough of a toehold and a Christian burkha will not be far behind.
Reading this reminded me of a section from the hard to get through article of Gitmo in Vanity Fair
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805
Here they are talking about..ah torture techniques.
“The brainstorming meetings inspired animated discussion. “Who has the glassy eyes?,” Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, 30 or more of them. She was invariably the only woman present—as she saw it, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even. “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas,” Beaver recalled, a wan smile flickering on her face. “And I said to myself, You know what? I don’t have a dick to get hard—I can stay detached.”
It’s true — financial risk-taking and viewing pinup pics light up the same portion of the brain. Other activities that stimulate this region of the brain include “picking up the dry cleaning,” “buttering toast” and “balancing a drink on a cafeteria tray while walking to a table.”
Personally, I like snakes. I wonder if they’d make me take risks? Hopefully not risks WITH the snakes.
The obvious conclusion I see from the study is that men have no self-control. Can’t be trusted. . .