Friday, September 11, 2009

Captain Obvious To The Rescue!

One of the things I've always found sort of cute about the field of psychology is the tendency of its practictioners to report their findings in the same logical, detached tone used by nuclear physicists to describe new subatomic particles, even when the results of their experiments are utterly unsurprising to anyone with a smidgeon of common sense or understanding of human nature. Case in point - the Dutch researchers who have "discovered" that men tend to get mentally discombobulated when speaking with an attractive woman. It would be one thing if the researchers were doing brain scans to try and tease out the physiological mechanisms that explain this, or determine whether testosterone-addled thinking affected some cognitive functions but not others - that might deepen our knowledge of the universe. As is, this study is like conducting an experiment to determine that most people perceive the sky as blue, or Hershey bars as tasting like chocolate - it doesn't tell as anything that anyone with half a semi-functional brain doesn't already know.

No comments:

Post a Comment