Sexual Arousal's Effect on Judgment

Wow. I tried to click on this a few days ago, but Blattman's link was dead. I must have missed this on Wisdom of Whores, but it was a link to Elisabeth Pisani's blog. So hattip to Blattman, and to Pisani. Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein published this article in 2006 in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and the abstract really blows your mind. As far as I can tell (I've not read it yet), Ariely and Loewenstein randomly put male college students into one of two groups where the two groups took an identical survey asking them about various hypothetical sexual scenarios, and whether they would do various things that were either high risk or sexually questionable (at least, I think that's the idea). The first group took the survey normally; the second group took the survey while masturbating. This group was paid $10 for participation. What they found was that being in a state of sexual arousal substantially changed their answers to the various questions. They were more likely to engage in unsafe sex, to have sex with women outside their "normal" preferences, and things of this nature. My first reaction to this is that this is incredible, in every sense of that word. My second reaction is that this is really kind of interesting. The fact of the matter is, when men are sexually aroused, their entire decision-making process becomes telescoped around the goal of sexual gratification. I look forward to reading this later.