Merritt, A. et al., “The Strategic Pursuit of Moral Credentials,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).
She hot, me dumb
You don’t have to be around men for long to notice how easily they can be distracted by a sexy woman. However, new research shows that men don’t even have to see the woman, or know that she’s sexy. In one experiment, men sat down at a computer and were given instructions via text chat--supposedly from an experimenter with either a male or female name--to speak into a webcam that the experimenter was supposedly monitoring. After this task, the men took a cognitive test. Men who thought they had interacted with a female significantly underperformed. This happened even when men hadn’t yet interacted with the female but had been told to expect such an interaction. Meanwhile, women’s cognitive performance didn’t seem to be affected by the same kinds of interactions with men.
Nauts, S. et al., “The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (forthcoming).
The values diet
Losing weight is hard. Wouldn’t it be nice if a simple one-time exercise could shave off several pounds over several months? Researchers asked women to write about their most important value and why it was important to them, or about a less important value and why it might be important to someone else. Two and a half months later, women who had written about their most important value had lost weight, whereas women who had written about a less important value had gained weight. The first group also had smaller waists and better cognitive performance than the second group. The authors speculate that “affirming values freed up attentional resources” that could be used to pursue “health-related goals.”
