I am glad that no American tax money was spent on this tripe:
They are the go-to outfit for many women when they want to feel sexy and self-confident.
But could that favourite little black dress also be damaging to female brain function?
Research has revealed that women perform much worse on tests which measure reaction times and decision-making when they wear something tight and revealing, rather than something loose and comfortable.
Researchers from the University of Toronto found women were slower to respond to challenges and made poorer decisions.
Go here to read the rest. We live in an age of junk science in which endless amounts of money are wasted to either tell us what common sense would already tell us or to lend support to some preposterous theory. Scientism, what sins are committed in your name!
Flustered people aren’t as good at decisions!
NEWS AT 11!!
Yep and doubtless some men taking tests with women wearing revealing clothes would have their attention distracted. Science today is good at revealing “news” about matters as old as Man.
Any female with a pulse could have clued them on clothes going from awesome and empowering to an embarrassing mess in moments just by a change in focus. If they hadn’t dumped their brain about the women involved being humans, and “sexy” not being a rare magical totem but instead being an a range of ways of being regarded, they’d already know that.
That study was done in the 70s, at least. 😀 IIRC, 10 point IQ drop from, ahem, feminine distraction.
I vaguely remember an attempt to do a version for women, but they forgot we’re not dudes and just used generic attractive guys. (We’re just not as visual.)
The report isn’t science by any definition. It’s propaganda disguised, with the math of statistics. STATISTICS IS NOT SCIENCE!!! It is a tool, like other kinds of mathematics. Also, PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT SCIENCE!!! It is witchcraft masquerading as science.
Foxfier – 10? I can drop 30, easy.
Also, PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT SCIENCE!!! It is witchcraft masquerading as science.
Tell us what you really think Bob. I took 20 hours of it as an undergrad and I always thought it was the modern equivalent of bringing out the shaman to wave his sticks and drive out the evil spirits!
I vaguely remember an attempt to do a version for women, but they forgot we’re not dudes and just used generic attractive guys. (We’re just not as visual.)
Social “scientists” would usually prefer to eat ground glass than admit what all of us know: men and women are different, and that it is those differences that make life possible, worth living and help ensure the journey through this Vale of Tears is so interesting.
Don, the shaman does his (her?) stuff effectively a certain percentage of the time. I imagine the success rate is about the same for both psychology and the tribal Shaman. BTW a good friend of mine in the 12 Step program is a certified Shaman.
The placebo effect in action Bob! (A certified Shaman! Credentialism run amok!)
Psychology is social science, which is a kind of science but very dependent on philosophy. I think Fulton Sheen said something like “ask me about my economics and I’ll tell you about my philosophy”. Statistics and the use of the scientific method in the social sciences are a two-edged sword. It forces enunciation of theories and tests them against reality, which can help disprove the lamer ones. But it also gives the fields a veneer of certainty that they don’t deserve. Add to that the fact that we’ve only recently started teaching stats to social scientists, and it’s probably been a net wash.
Also, PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT SCIENCE!!! It is witchcraft masquerading as science.
It’s not that, either. Psychology is a heterogeneous discipline. It has an academic aspect and a vocational aspect. Its vocational aspect is subdivided into people who make evaluations and people who offer counseling and ‘therapy’. It’s academic aspect can be experimental or observational. Some psychologists have more in common with biologists, some with sociologists, and some with neither – occupying themselves with observing individual subjects and not social relations. As a social research discipline, it has suffered from problems producing studies you can actually replicate. As a clinical discipline, it suffers from a problem it shares with psychiatry: in spite of its pretensions, it has no tools for advancing an understanding of normative questions. See Thos. Szasz on this point: the normative judgments of clinicians are just what is fashionable among this generation of practitioners. Some of them bring to the table an understanding of human disposition and behavior borne of spending decades listening to distressed people. Their professional organizations are generally on the side of some sort of malevolent undertaking. The apex and center of a guild is where you find a purified version of the guild’s vices.
There’s no reason to dismiss psychologists tout court. There is a reason to listen to them only selectively. This is especially true of clinicians, who are often dubious characters. (As an academic discipline, it’s arguably less corrupted than sociology or cultural anthropology, and no where near as comical as the studio art faculty).
t very dependent on philosophy.
A certain subset of psychologists would benefit from consulting philosophical literature. I doubt any of them do.
Social “scientists” would usually prefer to eat ground glass than admit what all of us know: men and women are different,
That’s not it. You can admit differences in a faculty subculture, but the ‘admission’ always has to be in service to or informed by the notion that ordinary men are defective and undesirable. Academics are seldom admirable people.
Psychology is social science,
Disagree. Psychology intersects with social research. More often than not, the object of study is the individual subject, not a social matrix.
art deco, you’re quite correct in subdividing psychology into various subdisciplines. I should have been more specific and said that my opinion was about clinical/ behavioristic psychology. An essential requirement of any scientific hypothesis is that hypotheses can be tested by reproducible observations/experiments and that such tests can be used to falsify the hypothesis in question. Where does that occur in the sorts of projects discussed in the article (I won’t dignify them by the name of experiments)?
An essential requirement of any scientific hypothesis is that hypotheses can be tested by reproducible observations/experiments and that such tests can be used to falsify the hypothesis in question. Where does that occur in the sorts of projects discussed in the article (I won’t dignify them by the name of experiments)?
That would place historical disciplines outside the realm of ‘science’. I think a large mass of palaeontology would have to be reclassified as something else, to take one example.
the historical sciences can be falsified by observation… e.g. finding mammalian bones in 1.5 billion year old strata. Granted, not finding such is like “proving all ravens are black by not finding any white ravens.” (Whose philosophical question was that?), but that’s philosophy not science.
Added later: that’s some philosopher’s critique of induction as a valid way of acquiring knowledge…forgot the guy’s name. In any case, he showed that using no negative findings to validate hypotheses led to internal contradictions.
Added later again: that’s Hempel’s Raven paradox to invalidate inductive epistomology.
And in that respect, cosmology is also one of the historical sciences–you don’t do cosmological experiments, just observations. Here’s a recent example for that: Penrose and ??? finding configurations in the microwave radiation spectrum that was evidence for his conformal cyclic cosmology (previous universe) until someone else showed you could get pentagrams, and all sorts of other figures in the background. My apologies for being so vabue about references but I’m too tired to do a web search for the original stuff.
Besides, this is a blog and we don’t have to prove what we’re saying!
the historical sciences can be falsified by observation…
Well, psychologists do formulate theories and undertake observational studies. The problem has been (at least in social psychology) that they have trouble replicating studies. Not sure if it applies to tests-and-measurements psychologists who study intelligence, learning, perception, &c.