Male brains link sex and money

[Darth Wong]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/04/financ ... index.html

Study: Men's brains link sex and money

WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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.

Professor Camelia M. Kuhnen is co-author of a study that examines a man's mind when he takes financial risks.

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 as 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.

Their research appears in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

The study involved 15 heterosexual young men at Stanford University. It focused on the sex and money hub, the V-shaped nucleus accumbens, which sits near the base of the brain and plays a central role in what you experience as pleasure.

When that hub was activated by the erotic images, the men were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain scans.

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."

Kuhnen said the same link could hold true for women, but they didn't test it because it is more difficult to find an erotic image that would appeal to many different heterosexual women compared to heterosexual men.

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 results of the study jibe with real life on the trading floor, said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago, Illinois, 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 the cleanest he and his colleagues could come up with.)

The study conforms with recent research that indicates men shown a pornographic movie were more likely to make riskier sexual decisions. Another suggests straight men think less about their financial future after being shown pictures of pretty women.

One still-to-be-published study at Harvard University found a link between higher testosterone levels and financial risk-taking.

But the study conducted at Stanford, funded by the National Institutes of Health, went deeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. It's part of a new but growing field called neuroeconomics that attempts to take the hard-wired science of brain biology and mix it with the softer sciences of psychology and economics to figure out why we make the financial decisions we do.

An earlier study by the same team found that the brain's reward area lit up at about the same time as risky decision-making.

The erotic pictures experiment was designed to find which was the cause and which was the effect. The answer: Lighting up the reward area, in this case with soft-core pictures, caused the risk-taking, Kuhnen said.

"The more activation there you have, the more prone you are to taking more risk," Kuhnen said. "It could be a feedback loop."

The flip side was that the photos of snakes and spiders activated the portion of the brain often associated with pain, fear and anger. And those people were more likely to bet low.

This all makes sense to Harvard economist Terry Burnham, author of the book "Mean Genes." Burnham said it could be all summed up in a famous line from the movie "Scarface."

"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."

Moral of the story: don't look at pretty girls or think about sex when you're trying to make financial decisions.

[TithonusSyndrome]

And this is why in rig towns, the money of the working class funnels quickly into the nightclubs.

[Glocksman]

And this is why in rig towns, the money of the working class funnels quickly into the nightclubs.

Funny you should say that.
I know a girl who graduated ready to be an accountant from a local college, yet she waited several years before going into practice simply because she made more money as a stripper than she would as a low level flunky in a local firm.

I don't doubt it as I've known strippers who'll take home $300/night (and declare maybe a third of that as taxable income) easily without becoming hookers.
God only knows what they'd have made if they'd been willing to give BJ's on the side.

[Death from the Sea]

God only knows what they'd have made if they'd been willing to give BJ's on the side.

probably a few more bucks but alot more trips to the doc to refill their valtrex scripts....

[PainRack]

Wasn't there an older article which shows how sexy pictures would lead men to make impulse buys as well?


That certainly explains all the beer ads:D

[Molyneux]

I don't know...did the study screen for fetishes?
Could have been a sexy little stapler...

On a more serious note, this is rather worrying. I know intellectually that humans are literally wired not to act completely rationally, but it's never fun getting my attention drawn to that fact.

Forewarned is forearmed, I guess.

[Xon]

This also shows how completely stupid the "invisible hand fo free market" truely is. Because at the heart of the free market concept, is the concept of "rational self-interest" which the OP shows to be critically flawed in humans.

[Enforcer Talen]

Outside USMC bases, Ive known strippers to get a thousand dollars a night. New marines can be retarded sometimes.

[Patrick Degan]

It is to be expected that rationality will fly out the window when the "invisible free hand" of the marketplace is wrapped around the client's dick.

[Enforcer Talen]

You have odd tastes I prefer the visible ones

[Admiral Valdemar]

You have odd tastes I prefer the visible ones

What about invisible vaginas?

Like any idealist... uh, idea, the thing falls down when reality kicks in. Socialism and the true free market are just two such examples, because in the end, humans are dicks or at least thinking with them a little too much.