August 12, 2014

"[M]en with a childhood history of diarrhea showed a distinctive preference for highly feminized female faces..."

"... by contrast, they betrayed no bias at all when asked to evaluate the faces of other men. Since you can’t inseminate another male—believe me, I’ve tried—that makes sense. The inverted pattern appeared for ladies with a childhood history of diarrhea: unlike their peers who preferred male faces with androgynous features, women who’d spent a worrisome amount of time on the toilet as little girls now liked their men, or at least their men’s faces, as manly as possible. Similarly, they showed no particular bias when it came to what makes a woman’s face attractive."

From a Scientific American item titled "This Queasy Love: How Having Frequent Diarrhea as a Child Shapes Your Adult Mate Choice," by Jesse Bering.

24 comments:

rhhardin said...

I've never understood a single article in Scientific American.

They have editors that screw everything up if it doesn't come in that way.

Now they have women writing for it, which perhaps was the problem all along.

MikeR said...

Most medical study results are wrong. This looks like a good example.

George M. Spencer said...

This is a study of a small number of people in rural Bangladesh? Is that right?

Ann Althouse said...

"I've never understood a single article in Scientific American. They have editors that screw everything up if it doesn't come in that way."

Perhaps the stress is more on "American" than "Scientific." Compare "military justice."

Quaestor said...

Do review the late Richard Feynman on"cargo cult" science. There seems to be a lot of that going around these days.

SJ said...

Correlation does not imply causation.

Thus, adult attraction towards a certain facial type does not cause previous childhood diarrhea...

Also, childhood diarrhea likely doesn't cause a change in adult attraction towards a certain facial type.

(Willing to be proven wrong here. I was about to say that the study needed long-term data on the health of the children. But the article says that they do...only because it was done in Bangladesh.

Which may, or may not, bring in a compounding factor of culture.

Wake me up when there's lots of cross-cultural data, and from multiple studies by different teams of researchers.)

MadisonMan said...

A study of 240 people from rural Bangladesh. Yeah, we can generalize that to the World. Why not!?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Ain't gonna read it. Don't care. It's a shame that calculations using statistics pass for science. IMHO, this (statistics passing as science) merits a tag.

sojerofgod said...

Unknown said, "Merits a tag"

Agree completely.

#100%ONBULLSHITOMETER

Wince said...

This study omits from the sample those of us who couldn't give two shits?

Fernandinande said...

MikeR said...
Most medical study results are wrong. This looks like a good example.


Zactly what I thunk.

MB said...

Why would anyone come up with that hypothesis in the first place?

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

You're shitting me.

The Crack Emcee said...

"Since you can’t inseminate another male—believe me, I’ve tried,..."

Whoa:

Somebody crank up the PRIDE Parade,...

James Pawlak said...

Did this study use Federal funds? If not, it was a candidate for such!

The real test is: Is it reliable and valid and with a high level of confidence.

Paul said...

Men in general have a distinctive preference for highly feminized female faces, so that would include both men with diarrhea as children as well as those suffering from constipation.

Of course the feminist imperative seeks to make abnormal or pathological that which is normal behavior regarding the sexes and their natural predilections.

mikeski said...

Sounds like another one for www.tylervigen.com to add to the list.

That is, if there was a way to quantify whatever facial features this study was measuring...

sinz52 said...

Prior to the 1980s, Scientific American used to be more like a real scientific journal. The articles were technical with lots of references.

Now it's been dumbed down to the level of Popular Science.

traditionalguy said...

Men's distinctive preference for the female form can be leg men, boob men, foot men, or ass men. A woman's face is more of a universal...unless eyes, long noses and eyeglasses are counted.

I think I am turning into a hand man more attracted by interesting fingers.

Anonymous said...

Ah, more "false positive bullsh!t masquerading as science."

Did the US Taxpayers pay for this study?

240 people? Then clearly what they did was collect a bunch of data and keep on generating "hypotheses" until one passed the 95% threshold. Do that with one data set and 30 hypotheses, and you're pretty much guaranteed that one will pass the (1 in 20 chance of being so by random chance) "filter".

If I were dictator of the world, I'd force them to do the exact same study on a different group of people, and if (when) their hypothesis failed, give everyone involved with this "study" a lifetime ban from ever receiving gov't fund, for any reason.

Anonymous said...

I thought Scientific American was at least vaguely "family friendly," that is, written mostly for adults perhaps but something you could safely hand to your 11 year old to browse in the car. So what is up with these remarks:

"Oh relax. I’m not about to share the sordid details of a revolting new sexual fetish. (That’s for another post.)"

"the curious connection between the hellish expunging of our intestinal contents and the type of person that we’re in turn most likely to marry—or simply to screw"

"Since you can’t inseminate another male—believe me, I’ve tried"

It would have been completely possible to write an article about this odd study without going to those places, so why did they go there?

George M. Spencer said...

The first thing I thought when I read this was...how many scientific articles about global warming are based on this level of scholarship.

ddh said...

Jan Myrdal once wrote that Finnish authorities issued more fox hunting licenses when divorce rates rose in Sweden. He used that example of what one should never do--cite a correlation without a hypothesis of how the relationship works. It is unfortunate that Scientific American's grasp of statistics is as weak as that of many scientists.