Handsome Men Make Other Men Want to Gamble

Dr. Robert Burriss
4 min readJun 2, 2015

Research has shown that men are especially prone to taking risks. We also know that humans are more likely to take risks if they are first shown images of attractive opposite sex people. What we don’t know is whether the important factor here is the attractiveness of the person in the image, or their sex. In other words, will a man throw his money to the winds after an encounter with a handsome man, or do men only become spendthrifts when they see a beautiful woman?

Role them bones! Gambling -104/365 by Niklas Morberg licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Eugene Chan of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, tested this question in four experiments, the results of which he recently published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

For the first experiment, he recruited 86 male volunteers. A third of the men were shown images of male Abercrombie & Fitch models, who you will know (unless you’ve spent the last 20 years walking around with your eyes clamped shut) are so hot that it’s astonishing anyone can get close enough to photograph them without melting their camera lens. Another third of the volunteers were shown images of regular men, the kind who for the past month or so have been trending on Twitter next to the least fun hashtag of all time: #DadBod. The final third of the volunteers were the control group: they didn’t see any photographs at all.

In the second phase of the experiment, the men completed a financial risk-taking task, which they were led to believe was unrelated to the photographs. The task involved choosing between a series of hypothetical financial scenarios. For example, volunteers could choose whether they would rather receive $50 or gamble on a 50/50 chance of receiving $100. The other scenarios worked much the same way, but the rewards were of varying size and there were different probabilities of receiving the reward. The men were offered $90 or a 90% chance of winning $100, and $100 or a 10% chance of winning $1000.

Notice how all of these choices have an equal expected outcome. If you kept playing you would end up with the same amount of money, regardless of which option you selected. This means that choosing to gamble wasn’t a smart or a stupid decision. It wasn’t like playing roulette in a casino where the odds are stacked in favour of the house, and if you keep gambling you’ll eventually end up broke. Chan’s test doesn’t indicate whether you’re intelligent or rational: only whether you’re more drawn to taking financial risks.

Yep, he’s pretty hot. Someone get me a deck of cards… Adam Ayash for Dasoul underwear 06 by Enrique Lin licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Chan wanted to see whether men were more likely to gamble if they had been exposed to pictures of attractive men, average men, or no men at all.

The effects were strong. Scores on the riskiness test varied between 0 and around 2. Men who had seen no photographs weren’t risky at all, with scores of around 0.6. Men who saw photographs of average males were slightly less risky: their scores were around 0.4. But men who had been exposed to the Abercrombie and Fitch models were a lot more risky, with scores or nearly 1.8. That’s about 170% of the level of risk seen in the control group.

That’s a big jump. Seeing attractive models made men much more willing to take financial risks.

If you’re keen to know what would happen if we put women in the same situation, you’re in luck. Chan ran the same experiment with women. He had 94 female volunteers view the same kind of photographs, this time of women rather than men. But now there was no difference between the groups in how riskily they behaved. However, the overall level of financial risk taking was relatively high, with scores around 1.2. All else being equal, the women in Chan’s study liked a gamble more than men did.

Chan’s follow up studies showed that men were more likely to gamble if they had a below average income, if they felt that their own attractiveness was inadequate, or if they were primed to think about sex.

How to explain all these results? Chan reasons that when a man encounters other more attractive men, he is motivated to increase his own attractiveness for fear of being outcompeted in the mating market. This feeling is stronger if he senses he is already lagging behind his competitors (if he feels like he is neither rich nor good-looking). Since it’s difficult to become more physically attractive without expensive plastic surgery or long-term gym membership, a man might try to instantaneously increase his appeal in another domain. He knows that women are attracted not only by appearance by also by a man’s spending power. So he starts chucking his cash about like a sex pervert in a strip club, thinking it makes him look like Warren Buffet.

Is this tactic successful? It could be, but I won’t be placing any bets.

Chan, E. Y. (in press). Physically-attractive males increase men’s financial risk-taking. Evolution and Human Behavior. Read summary

The content of this post first appeared in the 2 June 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.

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Dr. Robert Burriss

Evolutionary psychologist. Studies human attraction and mate choice. More at RobertBurriss.com