In everyday life, people frequently engage in pseudo-interactions with women e. Together, these results suggest that an actual interaction is not a necessary prerequisite for the cognitive impairment effect to occur.
Recent events, inspired by Nobel laureate Tim Hunt , have produced pictorial evidence that women can be distractingly sexy. You can subscribe to our newsfeed RSS.
Get books about improbable research and the Ig Nobel Prize. Men seem so strongly attuned to mating opportunities that they were influenced by rather subtle cues to a woman, even in the absence of clear information about her. Outside of the laboratory, men frequently anticipate interactions or engage in pseudo-interactions in which they have limited information about their interaction partner. Research on high-maintenance interactions suggests that certain types of interactions are cognitively taxing because they require people to manage their impressions and coordinate the interaction Finkel et al.
These studies suggest that interacting with a woman can be cognitively taxing for men Karremans et al. As the term suggests, it has so far been assumed that high maintenance interactions are cognitively taxing due to factors within the interaction. Thus, it might also be the case that, for high prejudiced whites, merely anticipating an interaction with an African American can already affect their cognitive resources. Thus, though the present research suggests that impression management is the cause of the cognitive impairment effect, future research should investigate exactly which impression management processes cause the effect, and if there are any other processes e.
Another suggestion for future research would be to investigate if the cognitive impairment effect also occurs for gay men. Studying if men show the same effects when anticipating an interaction with a woman, regardless of sexual orientation, would help us to gain more insight in this issue. Although more research is needed to investigate the exact processes that play a role in the cognitive impairment effect, and to study if it occurs in other groups of participants, such as in gay men, the present research gives us a little more insight in why Levin started stuttering by the time he reached the pond.
We thank Else Ouweneel for her contributions to the design of Study 1. Moreover, we would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author s and source are credited. This seems highly unlikely, however, as we do not have any theoretical reasons to expect such an effect.
National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Arch Sex Behav. Published online Nov 1. Johan C. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.
Sanne Nauts, Email: ln. Corresponding author. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Keywords: Cognitive performance, Executive functioning, Mixed-sex interactions, Error management theory. Study 1 In Study 1, participants completed a task in which a male or female experimenter was ostensibly observing them and sending them instant messages.
Procedure Participants were escorted to their cubicle by an experimenter of their own sex. Results and Discussion Mean latencies were computed across all five test blocks for both the Stroop pretest and the Stroop posttest. Open in a separate window. Procedure As in Study 1, participants were escorted to a cubicle by an experimenter of their own sex, ostensibly to collect stimulus materials for a study on lip reading.
Results and Discussion As in Study 1, mean latencies were computed across all five test blocks. Acknowledgments We thank Else Ouweneel for her contributions to the design of Study 1.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author s and source are credited. Footnotes 1 We used an instant messaging-manipulation in the current experiment. Is there a gender difference in strength of sex drive?
Theoretical views, conceptual distinctions, and a review of relevant evidence. Personality and Social Psychology Review. Social exclusion impairs self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. High-maintenance interaction: Inefficient social coordination impairs self-regulation. Instant messaging and disruption in the workplace. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Consequences of stereotype suppression and internal suppression motivation: A self-regulation approach.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Chatting with teenagers: Considering the place of chat technologies in teen life. The sexual overperception bias: Evidence of a systematic bias in men from a survey of naturally occurring events.
Journal of Research in Personality. Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Half were told that a man would observe them and the other half were led to believe that a woman would observe them. In reality, participants never engaged in the task.
After being told about it, they completed another Stroop test to measure their current level of cognitive functioning. But men who had been told a woman would observe them ended up doing much worse on the second Stroop task.
Since all of their participants were both heterosexual and young, they might have been thinking about whether the woman might be a potential date. The results may also have to do with social expectations.
Our society may place more pressure on men to impress women during social interactions. Although this hypothesis remains speculative, previous research has shown that the more you care about making the right impression, the more your brain gets taxed. Such interactions require us to spend a great deal of mental energy imagining how others might interpret our words and actions.
For example, psychologists Jennifer Richeson and Nicole Shelton found that Caucasian Americans who hold stronger racial prejudices face similar cognitive impairments after interacting with somebody who is African American.
In these situations, individuals who hold strong prejudices must try hard to come across as not prejudiced. In a different study, Richeson and her colleagues found that less privileged students at elite universities experience similar cognitive impairments after being observed by their wealthier peers.
In the case of men, thinking about interacting with a woman is enough to make their brains go a bit fuzzy. She is a researcher at the Stanford School of Medicine, where she investigates how stereotypes affect the careers of women and minority scientists.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.
0コメント