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Women "Advertise" Fertility

Posted by kdawson on from the but-we-knew-this dept.

Dik Zak writes with word of a paper published in the journal Hormones and Behavior. A study found that women take greater care over their appearance when they are at peak levels of monthly fertility. The researchers took two photos of each of 30 women, one near ovulation and one at the other end of her cycle. They then showed the paired photos (with faces obscured) to a group of observers, who were asked to judge in which photo the women were trying to look more attractive. The observers chose the "high fertility" subject nearly 60% more of the time than would be expected by chance.

7 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. 60% of 30? by Scooter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hardly statistically significant:-

    60% of 30 is 18 - I mean come on, that's only 3 over the pure chance 50%!

    1. Re:60% of 30? by ggKimmieGal · · Score: 2, Insightful
      From just personal female experience, I'll say it's probably true anyway. All of the girls I know (including myself) tend to wear hoodies, sweat pants and jeans during their least fertile time. However, I don't think the findings were properly analyzed.
      Instead it seems women subconsciously don their trendier clothes, more jewellery, plaster on make-up and flash more flesh when they are the most fertile moment in their monthly cycle.
      I would make a very safe bet that it isn't a subconscious thing at all. It's one of those female secret things that we get, but men just cannot.
  2. Bad study by G00F · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The case study was to small, only 30 women with only 2 pictures, not only did we not collect data, but with the lack of numbers we creates a very large error of margin.

    Example, flip a coin once, and you get heads, your test reveals 100% heads when flipping a coin. Flip it 10 times, you got heads 3 times, so according to this test when flipping a coin you have 30% chance to get heads. Now flip it 100 times. That number will be a lot closer to 50%.

    Try 1000 women with 6 pictures each (3 in prime and 3 out of prime) then have 100 different people scoring each card.

    All this test does is shows is hey maybe there is something, and let us do a real test.

    --
    The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
  3. Re:My Evolutionary Disadvantage by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Is english not your first language?

    You'd better be careful saying things like this around here, some slashbot will crop up and tell you that for lots of people on this thing, it isn't their first language.

    Frankly I think that if someone wants to participate in a discussion in a given language, they should do all they can to master it, which is why I haven't moved someplace tropical yet... I feel a responsibility to speak the local language. I only wish more people in the USA felt that way...

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re:No, 60% more by Threni · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > I've seen studies with meaningful results in as few as 8 samples.

    I don't think you have.

    > Nevertheless, this particular study had 1260 samples. 42 guessers * 30 guesses each. More than a
    > thousand samples is plenty for significance.

    The important number here is 42. You could ask 2 people to guess 1,000,000 times. That's 2,000,000 samples. That's plenty, right?

  5. NS article is missing a comma by palmer64s · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Dropping a comma changes the meaning of the sentence. It should read

    They chose the woman in her "high fertility" photo some 59.5 per cent of the time, more often than would be expected by chance.
  6. Re:There's a reason for that by GodInHell · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They did a similar study a while ago in a bar. They would ask female volunteers to give a saliva sample and have their picture taken. Then they calculated the area of the body that showed skin and found a correlation between "showing more skin" and ovulation. So it's likely more than just wanting to feel pretty, I mean you don't go in a bar if you feel "bloated and cramping". To me it looks like women are more horny why they are ovulating, which makes perfect sense if you think in terms of evolution. Right.. because women just stop living one week out of every 4. Or, oh wait, they could just go out when they feel like that and try to have fun - you know, since they're not sick (like you would be if you were feeling like that) and there's no damn reason not to. But, no, probably not feeling all that "frisky."

    -GiH