Researchers: talking to women makes men thick
Interacting with the opposite sex will make men's brains stop working, say psychologists at the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands
27 May 2009
MEN aren't the brightest of creatures at the best of times. And new research shows that talking to attractive women makes them even dimmer.
What’s more, researchers think that men are so busy showing off in an attempt to pull that their brain has no capacity for anything else.
The study found that after speaking to a female, men become markedly less competent at tasks like maths or word games. And if that woman is someone the man finds attractive, they become even worse.
Perhaps predictably, women were completely unaffected.
The trial, by psychologists at Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, asked whether interaction with the opposite sex affects cognitive function. They made participants – both male and female – talk with a stranger, of either sex, and complete a cognitive task, like mental arithmetic, before and after the interaction.
When men – whether single or not – spoke to women, their ability to carry out the task dropped. But when they spoke to other men, their abilities remained unchanged. Women’s performance stayed the same throughout.
The researchers suggest that men are more likely than women to "consider mixed-sex interactions in terms of a mating game", meaning that they are "prone to engage in effortful and cognitively demanding attempts to impress an opposite-sex partner" – or, in layman’s terms, they are always trying to get the woman into bed, and that takes brainwork.
The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
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