Sex and financial risk linked in brain

[Guest guest]

This article details something advertisers have known intuitively for

years: If you equate sex with the product that is being sold, it makes

the consumer more inclined to shell out money to buy it, or take the

risk associated with buying it.

People are so predictable.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080404/ap_on_sc/finance_and_sex;_ylt=A0WTcX

1hsvZH7JcAawms0NUE

Sex and financial risk linked in brain

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

46 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in

the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles —

sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely

to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of

something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler,

university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up

when financial risks are taken.

" You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women.

They trigger the same brain area, " said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern

University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford

University psychologist.

Their research appears in the current edition of the peer-reviewed

journal NeuroReport.

The study only involved 15 heterosexual young men at Stanford

University. It focused on the sex and money hub, the V-shaped nucleus

accumbens, which sits near the base of the brain and plays a central

role in what you experience as pleasure.

When that hub was activated by the erotic images, the men were far more

likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either

a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain

scans.

Stanford psychologist Knutson, a lead author of the study, says

it's all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial

decisions. The trigger doesn't have to be sex — it could be chocolate

or a winning lottery ticket.

" It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the

odds of winning a roulette game, " Knutson said. " What really matters is

that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over

into your financial decisions. "

Kuhnen said the same link could hold true for women, but they didn't

test it because it is more difficult to find an erotic image that would

appeal to many different heterosexual women compared to heterosexual

men.

The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of

years, to men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to

attract women, said McCabe, professor of economics, law and

neuroscience at Mason University, who wasn't part of the study.

" Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but,

of course, there's a downside to it, what we're seeing right now in the

economy, " McCabe said.

The results of the study jibe with the real life on the trading floor,

said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago commodities floor trader and current

analyst at Alaron Trading Corp.

" I'm not shocked that it may be part of the deal, " Flynn said

Friday. " When you talk about all the euphemisms for trading (on the

floor), they can be used for sex as well. "

( " Massaging the market " and " hardcore " were about the cleanest that he

and his colleagues could come up with.)

The study conforms with recent research that indicates men shown a

pornographic movie were more likely to make riskier sexual decisions.

Another suggests straight men think less about their financial future

after being shown pictures of pretty women.

One still-to-be-published study at Harvard University found a link

between higher testosterone levels and financial risk-taking.

But the study conducted at Stanford, funded by the National Institutes

of Health, went deeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging

machines. It's part of a new but growing field called neuroeconomics

that attempts to take the hard-wired science of brain biology and mix

it with the softer sciences of psychology and economics to figure out

why we make the financial decisions we do.

An earlier study by the same team found that the brain's reward area

lit up at about the same time as risky decision-making.

The erotic pictures experiment was designed to find which was the cause

and which was the effect. The answer: Lighting up the reward area, in

this case with soft-core pictures, caused the risk-taking, Kuhnen said.

" The more activation there you have, the more prone you are to taking

more risk, " Kuhnen said. " It could be a feedback loop. "

The flip side was that the photos of snakes and spiders activated the

portion of the brain often associated with pain, fear and anger. And

those people were more likely to bet low.

This all makes sense to Harvard economist Terry Burnham, author of the

book " Mean Genes. " Burnham said it could be all summed up in a famous

line from the movie " Scarface. "

" In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the

money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the

women. "

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