Quote:
1 hour ago, threelegs said:
Sorry, that wasn't footnoted, but you might be able to find it if you dig deep enough.
Perhaps of interest also is that the study was only done on men.
Alright, so I got copy of that book. The sources (including this one) are cited the way that citations are normally done in books (read: badly). I may not have found the source if I had had a physical copy and couldn't Ctrl+F a couple things.
This book doesn't cite the study itself, but rather Chapter 3 of
Don't Look, Don't Touch, Don't Eat: The Science Behind Revulsion by Valerie Curtis. The claim is on page 43. One of your book's claims is wrong. Curtis wrote: "While only 13 percent thought that they would find sex with an extremely fat women attractive in the cool state, the figure rose to to 24% in the aroused state." You'll note that this is NOT an increase of 11%. It is in fact an increase of 85% (WRONG: 24% - 13% = 11%, RIGHT: 24% / 13% - 100% = 85% OR (24% - 13%) / 13% = 85%) Curtis continues "Similarly, the idea of anal sex and sex with animals increased in attractiveness by 67 percent and 167 percent, respectively, in the excited state." Since someone other than McAuliffe did the math on this one, those values are accurate. Except that the study didn't measure the percent of people that found various things attractive at all (more below).
Curtis cites the source of her claim as: D. Ariely,
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (London; HarperCollins, 2008)
One thing you might notice is that this is not a study, but yet another book. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it was actually written by one of the researchers on the study, who recounts the history of the study in great detail in chapter 5. Here's a hilarious excerpt I found:
"ROY, AN AFFABLE, studious biology major at Berkeley, is in a sweat—and not over finals. Propped up in the single bed of his darkened dorm room, he's masturbating rapidly with his right hand. With his left, he's using a one-handed keyboard to manipulate a Saran-wrapped laptop computer. As he idles through pictures of buxom naked women lolling around in various erotic poses, his heart pounds ever more loudly in his chest. As he becomes increasingly excited, Roy adjusts the "arousal meter" on the computer screen upward. As he reaches the bright red "high" zone, a question pops up on the screen: Could you enjoy sex with someone you hated?"
and:
"A copy of Playboy and a darkened room were about all we'd need for a high degree of success." - which was also my mentality in college.
This book includes a table with the results of the study and the values are exactly as Curtis presented them - difference of 85%, 67%, and 167% - and, finally, cites the actual damn study:
Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein, "The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making," Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (2006).
The actual study is attached to this post.
The study had 35 participants separated into 3 groups of 11, 12, and 12. The first were never tested while aroused, the second were tested while aroused and then again while non-aroused, and the third while aroused, then while non-aroused, then while aroused again. The sessions were conducted 1 day apart at a minimum. All in all, very rigorous but the sample size was tiny.
Notably, the "number interested" in this or that sexual activity is not what the study measured at all. This misrepresentation stems from Curtis, not McAuliffe. They actually measured people's answers to questions like "Can you imagine doing X?" and "Can you imagine finding Y attractive?" on a sliding scale and reported the difference between the students' answers. This is much better than the simple yes/no dichotomy presented by Curtis. I'm afraid I don't have the skills to analyze it properly but, the question of "Can you imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal?" Went from being answered with an average value of 6 when non-aroused to 16 when aroused (Hence the 167% increase) and this was on a scale of 0 (No) to 100 (Yes).
The survey includes many more questions and results than the three posted in this thread, they're worth a look!
<a class="ipsAttachLink" href="//www.zoowg.org/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=4789">HeatMoment.pdf</a>