Seriously, folks, who comes up with this shit?
Men under stress find overweight and obese women to be more attractive than do guys in a relaxed state of mind, new research finds.
The findings complement previous studies that have shown when resources are scarce, people prefer heavier partners, presumably because fatness is a sign that the person has access to food and is healthy. In women, for example, being underweight can make it more difficult to get and stay pregnant.
I don’t mind accepting that all these men who pester me for dates do it only because they are hugely stressed but the article makes no sense on any level. Even a child knows, I believe, that being underweight and being overweight are equally problematic for conception and pregnancy. And do people really associate being fat with being healthy? If so, it must be their utter stupidity that leads them to experience all this stress.
This kind of inane “research” annoys me more than words can express. There is so much that is wrong with this “study” that I wonder who employs these pseudo-scientists and why it even makes sense to keep them on the payroll. The entire premise behind it is obviously based on the researchers’ unhealthy bias. “Why on Earth would anybody want to have anything to do with these disgusting fatties?” they probably asked themselves. “There must be something deeply wrong with such people. Now let’s go and prove that they must be psychologically damaged in some way.”
It’s mind-boggling how often people sell their own intellectual limitations as some sort of a scientific breakthrough.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, it is actually a proper paper, published in a relatively high impact biological journal, so you may want to check the original source…
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0042593
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If this is what counts as science in a the field of biology, then oy. I can get a small group of people to say they find pink elephants attractive. All this experiment would prove is that you can lead people to say pretty much anything. What people SAY they are attracted to and what they are attracted to are completely different things.
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So, the group that was busy with a second activity, did not take the time to be so hyper-critical of the images?
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The paper, typically of ev psych, actually demonstrates not a shred evidence for any reason for this preference. All that is in the realm of speculation. So if stress (in men) causes fatter women to seem more attractive, there is no way of telling why. That is why evolutionary psychology is a classic “bullshit field.”
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Exactly. I hate evo psych. Its only use is to diagnose the psychological problems of people who appreciate its myths.
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The premise of evolutionary psychology is that whereas “society” operates in a logical way, human beings are instinct-driven animals. This mindset is most apparent in the studies on women and sex (women and sex being the same thing, of course.) We get The British publication, The New Scientist, and it’s full of articles about pseudo-scientific studies like the “fat” study.
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The most frequent use of evo psych is to justify hatred and oppression of women. It has become very popular in FSU countries in the past 2 decades as part of an anti-feminist backlash.
It makes me want to vomit whenever people trot it out.
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Don’t dismiss it entirely. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my A-level psychology unit, it’s that the evolutionary explanation of attachment is extremely well founded. o:
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“that the evolutionary explanation of attachment is extremely well founded.”
– So what is the explanation?
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It is bullshit.
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Psychology as a discipline is a deeply suspect, but their internal logic is iron-clad. If I object to this hypothesis, for example, it can be explained by the fact that (a) the culture I live in makes me very sensitive and defensive about my extra kilos, and consequently (b) I see neutral scientific research as a personal attack and feel the need to discredit it. If a ‘relaxed’ man (or one who meets their parameters for ‘relaxed’) says he’s attracted to fat women like me, the explanation would probably be that as an evolutionary animal, he is evaluating his current circumstances, probably seeing a high-stress future coming up, and picking a mate better suited to that future. And so on, and so forth.
This complete inability to admit to possible alternatives, take things like cultural context into account, and generalise authoratively from a small sample size are things that make psychology quite an imperialistic discipline, in my opinion. And I distrust all imperialist projects.
PS: A few months ago another evol. psych. in England wrote a book called, or promoted as, “Why Do Women Have Sex?” Why, indeed. Is there a lot of funding for this sort of thing suddenly?
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More pseudoscience. For real science, follow the explorations of Curiosity.
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So the reason I couldn’t get dates in high school wasn’t because I was overweight, but because I wasn’t hanging out with boys who were stressed out enough. Makes sense. Not really.
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We, the fatties, have got to learn to stress them out so bad that they will disregard our horrible defect.
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My neighbor the ev psych fan is convinced that men can only stay attracted to the same person for a year, and attached to a child for five. He is a man. Consider the self image this bespeaks.
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Oh my God, N. has been attached to me for five years! I must be a child. Albeit a fat one. Well, maybe it’s all because he is stressed. 🙂
On a serious note, what a great excuse not to work through one’s psychological issues. “Science says I’m fine, even though my personal life is a mess.” Poor idiot.
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Yes, it’s all an excuse — you cite evolution so as to avoid evolving further. I might have misunderstood but I think this neighbor also supports Creationism. Evidently coherence is not required.
About attraction, where did they come up with this formula I have had quoted to me several times over the decades: in a lifelong marriage, more than half of the total sex which is had, will be had in the first year? Is it possible that this is true for most people? (My theory: they weren’t attracted in the first place, but they had hormones and were a good match socially.)
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“(My theory: they weren’t attracted in the first place, but they had hormones and were a good match socially.)”
– This is my theory, too. I’ve heard this myth (the attraction doesn’t last for more than 6 months, etc.) more times than I care to remember. It’s like a mantra that people use to justify settling for crappy personal lives, in my opinion. They convince themselves that this is how it should be because otherwise they would have to start questioning what they are doing wrong.
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Hi got nothing to really add to this but your last line?
“It’s mind-boggling how often people sell their own intellectual limitations as some sort of a scientific breakthrough.”
Is so spot on I’m thinking of getting it tattooed on my self.
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I think we should get the people who have this issue to tattoo it on their selves. 🙂
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It’s another outcome of patriarchal emotional repression and an attempt to find a solution to it. If a real explanation, a personal one, cannot be found, because one has chosen to repress anything vaguely resembling “an emotion”, then a reason for one’s choices has to be manufactured. In other words, whilst I (Jennifer) am aware of the reasons why I am attracted to certain people, other people are not aware of why they choose their partners. They have no insight concerning this. I love Lacan’s “solution” that we are linguistically programmed to make our particular choices. I am attracted to guys called Jack. Any old Jack will do, so long as that is his name. I’ll find a way to make it work. Not.
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It is true that in certain societies a few more pounds are linked to more material abundance. I would imagine for some that would be more attractive. I dont think you need to be stressed out to get the connection. 😉
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The experiment was conducted on the British men, though. Of course, the British food is yucky, but I’m sure the Brits are not exactly starving. 🙂
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See this is what happens when male sexuality swings from “Fuck all those other buttons, there is only one.” to “There are 20 buttons BUT each one has one reason and one reason only to be pushed.” It’s no longer a matter of it just being simple. Now folks seem hell bent on trying to strip anything resembling complexity to make it simple again.
I’ve been stressed out for a long time so I’d really like to know why my interests in women vary wildly on the size scale. Seriously if someone asked me to pick whether skinny women or fat women were more attractive I couldn’t answer it (Now if you show me a specific skinny woman and a specific fat women I can give an answer, but then it would be based on looks alone and we all know that there is more to attraction than look).
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” Seriously if someone asked me to pick whether skinny women or fat women were more attractive I couldn’t answer it (Now if you show me a specific skinny woman and a specific fat women I can give an answer, but then it would be based on looks alone and we all know that there is more to attraction than look).”
– And here we have the definition of a healthy sexuality.
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Also, I don’t find the kind of women I might be attracted to varies that much from day to day or year to year. The kind of experimental manipulation need for an experiment (stress some men out, show them photos) does not seem to correspond intuitively to my conception that such preferences are pretty much *set* for many people, often at an early age.
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At a very early age, you are right. I’ve been looking for my greatgrandfather who brought me up in every man in my life. It’s uncanny how much N. resembles him. They both have Polish origins, too. You can stress me out all you want but I will still want somebody like my greatgrandfather. 🙂 🙂
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“Seriously, folks, who comes up with this shit?”
I assume it’s researchers who conflate correlation (in a specific study/set) with causation (in humans in general, across all cultural/historical instances).
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Exactly.
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“There must be something deeply wrong with such people. Now let’s go and prove that they must be psychologically damaged in some way.”
It really sounds like something that evolutionary psychologists would come up with. ‘Science! Done backwards!’ *facepalm*
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Yes, this is totally evo psych, a.k.a. the definition of a pseudoscience.
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