Men behaving badly

Self-study

Men behaving badly, single-handedly

Marc Abrahams
Tuesday November 22, 2005
The Guardian

When a young man masturbates, exactly how distracted does he get? An experiment performed on students at the University of California, Berkeley aimed to find out.

Full details are in a study that will be published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. Dan Ariely, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and George Loewenstein, of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, describe their arousing achievement in dry, formal terms: "We examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self-stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students."

....

Ariely and Loewenstein say their results are "striking" and more than confirm what most people believe about young men as a group - that when aroused, they (1) become sexually attracted to things otherwise offputting; (2) grow more willing to engage in morally questionable behaviour that might lead to sex; and (3) are more likely to have unprotected sex.

"[Our] study shows that sexual arousal influences people in profound ways," they write. "Efforts at self-control that involve raw willpower are likely to be ineffective." This is a dig at theorists - the ones who advise people to just say no - from experimentalists who are unafraid to get their hands dirty.