Monday, January 22, 2007

I love psych studies

From this post:
It seems beauty isn’t all in the eye of the beholder after all. Researchers have shown women rate a man as more attractive after they’ve seen another woman smiling at him. By contrast, being a jealous bunch, male observers rate a man as less attractive after they’ve seen a woman smiling at him.
This is pretty interesting to me. Primarily because I've always thought that women were more jealous than men. But perhaps that's because I'm not the jealous type? So maybe I'm just taking my own point of view and assuming that's the way it is for everyone.

Also, I would think that seeing a woman smiling would make a man happier, and therefore more likely to give a more positive rating?

I'll have to read up more on those findings, because really, I've got lots of examples coming to mind of both men and women being pretty damn jealous. What do you guys think?

1 comment:

Matthew Pianalto said...

I was just reading today parts of Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, and the studies he draws from suggest that male jealousy is rooted in threats of sexual infidelity (from the standpoint of your genes, it's no good to support children that aren't actually yours, so you don't want your steady woman messing around). For women, jealousy centers not on sexual infidelities, but rather emotional infidelities: sure, it's bad if your man f***s around, but WORSE if he falls in LOVE with someone else (b/c he'll probably leave if he's in love, which amounts for the woman and child to a loss of resources and support). I don't know if this is right, but it's at least interesting...