WASHINGTON, DC — There are countless anecdotes and jokes about how often men think about sex. Now researchers say some of the humorous tales may be true, at least when it comes to financial risk.A new brain-scan study performed as a cooperative venture between financial researchers at Northwestern University and psychologists at Stanford indicated there may be an unconscious psychic link between risky financial behaviors and sex. Young men were more likely to take larger financial gambles after they were shown erotic images than after they were shown scary or neutral pictures. According to results published in the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport, brain scans indicated the same area of the brain is involved with both the processing of erotic images and the decision to take financial risks.
“[Men] have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women,” Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor, said of the study. “They trigger the same brain area. The more activation there you have, the more prone you are to taking more risk. It could be a feedback loop.”
According to Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, the sex-and-money hub — called the nucleus accumbens — is a V-shaped pleasure center that sits near the brain stem. The same effect might be expected with almost any positive stimulus of that area — including eating chocolate or winning the lottery.
“It didn’t matter if the sexy woman didn’t tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game [one of the financial risks],” Knutson told Wired. “What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact that bleeds over into your financial decisions.”
The researchers said the same link might be present in women, but women weren’t tested. Kuhnen said part of the reason for that is finding erotic imagery that appeals to women is much more difficult than finding images that stimulate heterosexual men.
Some analysts think the study’s results could explain larger societal issues.
“Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success [in the mating game, which is a natural part of human evolution], but of course there’s a downside to it: what we’re seeing right now in the economy,” George Mason University professor of economics, law and neuroscience Kevin McCabe told Wired.
The Northwestern-Stanford study is one of three linking sex and risk that have been published recently. The other two indicated men shown pornographic movies make riskier sexual decisions and straight men tend to think less about their financial futures after viewing pictures of pretty women.
A fourth study, yet to be published but conducted at Harvard, reportedly found a link between testosterone levels and risk-taking: The higher the testosterone, the greater the willingness to take financial risks.
The Northwestern-Stanford study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
