Paying Attention to your Genitals Changes the Kind of Relationships you Seek
You must have seen that obnoxious t-shirt, worn by bro’s and fratboys everywhere. The one with a design of two arrows: one pointing up towards the wearer’s face and labelled ‘the man’, and the other pointing groin-wards and labelled ‘the legend’.
Classy.
I don’t know, I suppose you could look at it as endearing. Your average ‘brah’ spends all day thinking about his todger. He just wants to make sure everyone else is thinking about it too. It’s his way of sharing his interests.
Adam Fetterman, a social psychologist working at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tubingen, Germany, recently asked what thinking about your own genitals (or ‘genital salience’ as he calls it) does to our mating psychology.
He brought 59 men and 74 women to his lab and told them that they would be taking part in an experiment about the effects on decision making of wearing different shapes and colours. But this was just a cover story, meant to give volunteers the impression that each of them would wear a different shape of a different colour on the front of their shirts. This wasn’t true. All volunteers were asked to clip a foot-long orange cardboard arrow to their shirts. The clip was either fixed to the point of the arrow or the back of the arrow, so that once it was fixed to a volunteer’s shirt gravity ensured that the arrow either pointed up at the volunteer’s face or down towards their groin. The idea was the downwards pointing arrow would draw the volunteers’ attention to their own genitals (increase their genital salience), and that the upwards pointing arrow would act as a control.
The volunteers wore the arrows while completing a series of questionnaires. Some of these questionnaires were fillers, meaning that Fetterman never intended to analyse their results. They were in there just to hide the most important questions from the volunteers so that they couldn’t guess what the experiment was really about. The questions that Fetterman really wanted the answer to were about the volunteers’ interest in long- and short-term relationships. Were the volunteers currently seeking a one night stand, willing to have sex with a stranger, interested in a brief affair, or were they after a stable relationship and a potential marriage partner?
Fetterman crunched his numbers to see if there was any difference in the volunteers’ responses depending on their gender and the direction of their arrow.
He found that volunteers in the genital salience group were slightly more interested in mating opportunities of both the long- and short-term variety than were those in the control group. There was also a somewhat larger effect of gender, with men more into relationships of all kind. Overall, the long-term relationships appealed more than the short-term.
All well and good, but Fetterman then carried out a more complicated analysis. What happens when you look at all three of the variables together: genital salience, the gender of the volunteer, and the type of relationship? After all, we know that men and women differ in the kinds of relationship they prefer, and it’s plausible that genital salience affects men and women differently.
This is exactly what Fetterman found. When men wore the arrow pointing at their groin, their interest in short-term relationships was higher than it was in men who wore the upwards pointing arrow. For women, there was no effect of the arrow on their interest in casual hook-ups. However, women who wore the downwards pointing arrow did find long-term relationships more interesting than the women in the control group did. In this case, the arrow didn’t affect men.
This suggests that genital salience boosts sex-specific interests in sexual relationships. When their attention is directed towards their genitals, women hanker more for a long-term relationship, whereas men are driven more strongly towards meaningless flings. So, if you needed another reason to steer clear of fratboys wearing semi-humourous t-shirts, you’ve just found one.
Fetterman, A. K., Kruger, N. N., & Robinson, M. D. (2015). Sex-linked mating strategies diverge with a manipulation of genital salience. Motivation and Emotion, 39(1), 99–103. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 19 May 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
