Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Alyssa Royse
It appears to be a scientific fact that men don’t think all that clearly when in the presence of a woman that they find attractive. Further, that they will go out of their way to continue to see a woman that they find attractive. Duh, right? We’ve known this since high school, when boys stood outside of our chemistry classes and then pretended they were there for some other reason.
Without laying blame (for the moment,) I think we need to acknowledge that this happens. And I have solid business reasons for thinking this:
- Men need to be able to acknowledge that their business judgment may be clouded so that they can double-check their decisions without fear and shame.
- Women who intentionally use sexuality to manipulate men need to know that we’re on to them.
- We need to have a name for this behavior so that we can collectively stand up to it, just like we did to sexual harassment when men were grabbing women’s asses and asking for nooners in order to raise them up the corporate ladder.
Fortunately, there is scientific data to back up the idea that men do not think clearly around women to whom they are attracted.
One of the earlier published studies on the matter is from Dr. Hans Breiter at Massachusetts General Hospital. The study, which was originally published in 2001 in the journal Neuron, looked at brain activity in the “reward” centers of men’s brains. These activities are routinely stimulated by things like food, drugs and money, but the researchers wanted to see what happened when men were presented with attractive women. And sure enough, when men were presented with attractive women, those parts of the brain were “sprung.”
“It looks like there can be a difference between what the brain ‘likes,’ an image that is judged to be attractive, and what the brain ‘wants,’ something that is regarded as a reward in and of itself,” study author Dr. Hans Breiter, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in a statement.
What’s interesting, however, is that men were asked to rate a series of images of both men and women as beautiful. According to a Reuters article about the study:
In their experiments, the researchers first asked a group of men to rate how attractive they found the faces… and attractive male faces garnered ratings similar to attractive female faces.
But in the next phase of the study, men in another group were allowed to control how long they viewed a particular face by pressing a key. Breiter’s team found that they “expended effort” to see the beautiful female faces for a longer time, but for all other faces they tried only to “make the faces disappear faster.”
… A third group of men studied with brain imaging known as functional MRI, the investigators found that only the attractive female faces set off the brain’s “reward circuitry.”
“It’s particularly interesting that the attractive male faces actually produced what could be considered an aversion response, even though they had been recognized as attractive,” Breiter said.
So science can prove that men “feel good” when they’re around pretty women. Logic has proven that people, in general, will try to do things that feel good.
There is a more recent study, however, which clearly shows that men’s ability to think, perform tasks and to reason is seriously hampered by the presence of women to whom they are attracted.
Research published just this year in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, suggests that men expend so much energy trying to impress women that they are attracted to, that they literally cannot think straight. And they don’t even realize it!
The research, conducted at Radboud University in the Netherlands, tested 40 heterosexual men. As explained in the Telegraph:
Each one performed a standard memory test where they had to observe a stream of letters and say, as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last.
The volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting to male or female members of the research team before repeating the test. The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.
But when the task was repeated with a group of female volunteers, they did not get the same results. Memory scores stayed the same, whether they had chatted to a man or a woman.
Psychologist Dr George Fieldman, a member of the British Psychological Society, said the findings reflect the fact that men are programmed to think about ways to pass on their genes.
‘When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call ‘reproductively focused. But a woman also looks for signs of other attributes, such as wealth, youth and kindness. Just the look of the man would be unlikely to have the same effect.’
Now for the blame laying. The vast majority of us women know that we can flirt our way into getting our way. As the Radboud study suggests, we are also fairly keyed into other factors, things like wealth, power, and security. And we may just be as genetically programmed to use our “attractiveness” to get those things as men are to try and get laid. However, our cognitive abilities are not dulled in pursuit of our goals – I’d go so far as to say they get sharpened, but I haven’t found research to support that yet.
And when the dulling of men coincides with the sharpening of women, that may cause trouble in the workplace. Especially when we do it knowingly, and they respond unknowingly.
As in the case of my friends, which started this whole series, they were not only behaving like fools (which was funny,) but making bad decisions to support a company that was so-so at best (I was more generous in my original post,) and were bringing other men into the web. Their decision-making was clearly clouded. And she knew it. She was causing and using it.
The larger problem, however, was that they were totally unaware of their behavior and utterly unable to see that she was manipulating them.
So, given the research, what’s the deal? Were they genuinely oblivious because they’re genetically unable to see clearly in the presence of a pretty woman? Were they, as was suggested by Fredrick Lane, perfectly well aware of it but unwilling to stop it because, well, there’s always a chance they may get laid?
Either way, we need to admit this happens. Men need to be “allowed” to admit they were googly and dumb. Women need to NOT be allowed to get away with this shit. And we all need to call it something so that we can effectively stop it in the workplace.
