So in preparing my paper for the ASSA in New Orleans, I began undertaking the worst of ex-post justifications for why one should care about strip club patrons. My argument is that we have a lot of experimental evidence that decision making differs among different conditions or contexts. Yet we haven't really looked at who puts themselves in those contexts.
So here are some of the cites for the experimental work.
Aharon, I.,
The brain circuitry processing rewarding and aversive stimuli is hypothesized to be at the core of motivated behavior. In this study, discrete categories of beautiful faces are shown to have differing reward values and to differentially activate reward circuitry in human subjects. In particular, young heterosexual males rate pictures of beautiful males and females as attractive, but exert effort via a keypress procedure only to view pictures of attractive females. Functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T shows that passive viewing of beautiful female faces activates reward circuitry, in particular the nucleus accumbens. An extended set of subcortical and paralimbic reward regions also appear to follow aspects of the keypress rather than the rating procedures, suggesting that reward circuitry function does not include aesthetic assessment.
Ariely, D. and G. Loewenstein (2006). "The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making." Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 19(2): 87–98.
Despite the social importance of decisions taken in the ‘‘heat of the moment,’’ very little research has examined the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision making.Here we examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self-stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students. Students were assigned to be in either a state of sexual arousal or a neutral state and were asked to: (1) indicate how appealing they find a wide range of sexual stimuli and activities, (2) report their willingness to engage in morally questionable behavior in order to obtain sexual gratification, and (3) describe their willingness to engage in unsafe sex when sexually aroused. The results show that sexual arousal had a strong impact on all three areas of judgment and decision making, demonstrating the importance of situational forces on preferences, as well as subjects’ inability to predict these influences on their own behavior
Burnham, T. C. (2007). "High-testosterone men reject low ultimatum game offers." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274(1623): 2327-2330.
The ultimatum game is a simple negotiation with the interesting property that people frequently reject offers of ‘free’ money. These rejections contradict the standard view of economic rationality. This divergence between economic theory and human behaviour is important and has no broadly accepted cause. This study examines the relationship between ultimatum game rejections and testosterone. In a variety of species, testosterone is associated with male seeking dominance. If low ultimatum game offers are interpreted as challenges, then high-testosterone men may be more likely to reject such offers. In this experiment, men who reject low offers ($5 out of $40) have significantly higher testosterone levels than those who accept. In addition, high testosterone levels are associated with higher ultimatum game offers, but this second finding is not statistically significant.
Loewenstein, G., D. Nagin, et al. (1997). "The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Expectations of Sexual Forcefulness." Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 34(4): 443.
Decisions to commit crimes are often made under the influence of visceral feelings such as anger or sexual arousal. Rational choice models of offender decision-making assume that individuals can anticipate, in an unaroused state, their responses to such visceral feelings. This assumption is tested in an experiment in which sexually aroused and nonaroused males predict their own behavior in a date rape scenario. Aroused and nonaroused participants were asked a battery of questions designed to measure their perceptions of the costs and benefits of acting in a sexually aggressive manner, their level of arousal, and a probabilistic prediction as to how aggressively they would act in the conditions described in the scenario. The authors find that sexual arousal does increase subjects' expectations of their own sexual aggressiveness and that this impact is not mediated by perceptions of the costs or benefits of such aggression.
Waitresses completed an on-line survey about their physical characteristics, self-perceived attractiveness and sexiness, and average tips. The waitresses’ self-rated physical attractiveness increased with their breast sizes and decreased with their ages, waist-to-hip ratios, and body sizes. Similar effects were observed on self-rated sexiness, with the exception of age, which varied with self-rated sexiness in a negative, quadratic relationship rather than a linear one. Moreover, the waitresses’ tips varied with age in a negative, quadratic relationship, increased with breast size, increased with having blond hair, and decreased with body size. These findings, which are discussed from an evolutionary perspective, make several contributions to the literature on female physical attractiveness. First, they replicate some previous findings regarding the determinants of female physical attractiveness using a larger, more diverse, and more ecologically valid set of stimuli than has been studied before. Second, they provide needed evidence that some of those determinants of female beauty affect interpersonal behaviors as well as attractiveness ratings. Finally, they indicate that some determinants of female physical attractiveness do not have the same effects on overt interpersonal behavior (such as tipping) that they have on attractiveness ratings. This later contribution highlights the need for more ecologically valid tests of evolutionary theories about the determinants and consequences of female beauty.
Van Den Bergh, B. and S. Dewitte (2006). "Digit Ratio (2D: 4D) Moderates the Impact of Sexual Cues on Men’s Decisions in Ultimatum Games." Proceedings- Royal Society of
Three experimental studies demonstrate that ‘sex-related cues’ impact human decision-making in ultimatum games. In the ultimatum game, two individuals divide a sum of money. The proposer offers a portion of the money to the other player, the responder. If the responder accepts the offer, the money is distributed in agreement with the proposer’s offer. If the responder rejects the offer, neither player receives anything. Our studies show that exposure to pictures of sexy women or lingerie increases the likelihood of accepting unfair offers. Digit ratios of responders are reliably associated with their behaviour: males with lower digit ratios are more likely to reject an unfair split in neutral contexts, but more likely to accept unfair offers in sex-related contexts.
Waldherr, M. and
Sexual activity and mating are accompanied by a high level of arousal, whereas anecdotal and experimental evidence demonstrate that sedation and calmness are common phenomena in the postcoital period in humans. These remarkable behavioral consequences of sexual activity contribute to a general feeling of well being, but underlying neurobiological mechanisms are largely unknown. Here, we demonstrate that sexual activity and mating with a receptive female reduce the level of anxiety and increase risk-taking behavior in male rats for several hours. The neuropeptide oxytocin has been shown to exert multiple functions in male and female reproduction, and to play a key role in the regulation of emotionality after its peripheral and central release, respectively. In the present study, we reveal that oxytocin is released within the brain, specifically within the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus, of male rats during mating with a receptive female. Furthermore, blockade of the activated brain oxytocin system by central administration of an oxytocin receptor antagonist immediately after mating prevents the anxiolytic effect of mating, while having no effect in nonmated males. These findings provide direct evidence for an essential role of an activated brain oxytocin system mediating the anxiolytic effect of mating in males.
Organisms 'discount the future' when they value imminent goods over future goods. Optimal discounting varies: selection should favour allocations of effort that effectively discount the future relatively steeply in response to cues promising relatively good returns on present efforts. However, research on human discounting has hitherto focused on stable individual differences rather than situational effects. In two experiments, discounting was assessed on the basis of choices between a smaller sum of money tomorrow and a larger sum at a later date, both before and after subjects rated the 'appeal' of 12 photographs. In experiment 1, men and women saw either attractive or unattractive opposite-sex faces; in experiment 2, participants saw more or less appealing cars. As predicted, discounting increased significantly in men who viewed attractive women, but not in men who viewed unattractive women or women who viewed men; viewing cars produced a different pattern of results.
No comments:
Post a Comment