Men Take More Risks When Pretty Women Are Around

Be­ing around a pret­ty wo­m­an can make men take more risks, a new study finds.

Re­search­ers looked at the risk-tak­ing be­haviors of 96 young adult men, with an av­er­age age of near­ly 22, by ask­ing them to do both easy and dif­fi­cult tricks on skate­boards.

First, the young men per­formed the tricks in front of another man, then in front of a young, at­trac­tive fe­male. (The at­trac­tive­ness of the wo­m­an was in­de­pen­dent­ly as­sessed by 20 male raters.)

The tes­tos­terone lev­els of the skate­board­ers were mea­sured af­ter each trick. Tes­tos­terone is a male sex hor­mone that fu­els sex­u­al in­ter­est, arousal and ac­tiv­i­ty, and is al­so as­so­ci­at­ed with in­creased com­pe­ti­tion and risk-tak­ing.

When skate­board­ers at­tempt tricks, they make a split-se­cond de­ci­sion about whether to abort the trick or try to land it, based on a mid-air eval­u­a­tion of the like­li­hood of suc­cess and on the phys­i­cal costs that fail­ure might bring — such as falling flat on their face.

It was that mo­ment the re­search­ers sought to ex­amine, be­cause it re­sem­bles the type of risky de­ci­sions that young men make when be­hind the steer­ing wheel of a car or when in phys­i­cal con­fron­ta­tions with each other. As a group, young males are at the high­est risk of ear­ly death of any group in in­dus­trial­ized coun­tries in part be­cause they are the biggest risk-tak­ers.

As the re­search­ers ex­pect­ed, the skate­board­ers took greater risks in the pres­ence of the at­trac­tive fe­male, even when they knew there was a greater chance they could crash. Along with this in­creased risk-tak­ing, the young men had high­er tes­tos­terone lev­els when they per­formed in front of the fe­male than when they did their jumps in front of another guy.

"This ex­per­i­ment pro­vides evi­dence for an ef­fect that has ex­ist­ed in art, mythol­o­gy, and lit­er­a­ture for thou­sands of years: Beau­ti­ful wo­m­en lead men to throw cau­tion to the wind," wrote the au­thors of the study, Richard Ro­n­ay and Wil­li­am von Hip­pel, of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land in Aus­tralia.

"Th­ese find­ings suggest that, for men, the adap­tive ben­e­fits gained by en­tic­ing mates and in­timi­dat­ing ri­vals may have re­sult­ed in evolved hor­mo­n­al and neu­ro­log­i­cal mech­anisms that fa­cil­i­tat­ed greater risk-tak­ing in the pres­ence of at­trac­tive wo­m­en," they add­ed.

The re­sults of the re­search are de­tailed in the first is­sue of the jour­nal So­cial Psy­cho­log­i­cal and Per­so­n­al­i­ty Sci­ence.