factoring pretty girls into economic forecasts
For those of you who didn’t believe me the other night at Toastmasters >> you thought I was just being silly: but NO!
In the interests of ensuring that we get a clearer understanding of the economic and social determinants that drive our future, we sometimes need to pay attention to peculiar and surprising forces that skew the trends and introduce randomness and seeming chaos to financial markets, or bewilder political analysts.
I was being utterly serious: pretty ladies are indeed a hazard to sane & rational thought processes.. in men. Women it seems are blissfully exempt from going goofy no matter what the fellow looks like (yippee secret weapon for the ladies ;-) with built-in immunity)
Here’s the proof: from New Scientist . Beautiful women “scramble men’s ability to assess the future”.. The experiment is the grown-up version of the Marshmallow Test.
The prolific adaption of this within marketing or sales is a very old cliche : sex sells : if you want men to make big heroic or potentially hazardous leaps of faith then derail their sensible long-term orientated thinking (mmm.. suddenly I understand why particularly strategic negotiators will use stripclubs to their almost unfair advantage). So whether it’s buying an “investment” car or investing large sums of money (ever find it odd that Investec hire so many beautiful women?!), engaging in battle or negotiating a big deal – short-circuiting the initial decision with lovely ladies around could be just the tipping point you need.
Clearly, this is true. Max, your beauty has me so scrambled that it felt like I was re-reading your post at the beginning of every paragraph.
So, weapons of mass distortion are things like the a massive public boradcast of FTV? My the battlefield really could change. Femmebots for everyone.
Hi Max,
Met you at the Jozi Geek dinner – “love your work”. Research indicates that when the jury comes in guilty on a murder rap on a defendant, the more beautiful (man or woman) they are, the lesser the sentence handed down by the judge. And, if you look like a “criminal”, you’ll the judge will throw the book at you.
Beauty taps into selection theory. As a species we want to survive and to increase the odds of survival, we need to “mate” with the dominant in the species. The more beautiful one appears, the more we think they are virile, intelligent and healthy.
Check out the movie “Species” – the alien went for the healthiest looking men to father her child. Of course, it all went south for the men when she discovered that there was something genetically wrong with them.
[...] I think they’re both alluding to the fact that women may well be better at this social-media stuff than men are. That is, females might have a biological advantage. After-all, women are generally better at the “soft-stuff” than men are…. And that’s a large part of what social-media is about. [...]
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