Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio. Guess what mang go with that?
Well, all right, so I was reading up this week on strange advantages that certain people have. You know, we're always trying to get a leg up on people who super competitive, as our listeners may know. But sure, it turns out that left handed people have a pretty distinct advantage, like when it comes to one on one sports. So you take boxing, tennis, fencing, even pitching a baseball if it involves taking aim at an opponent, lefties have a little bit of an edge. And if you look at
professional sports, the numbers actually bear this out. For instance, back in twenty seventeen, one third of Major League Baseball players were left handed.
That's kind of crazy, isn't it.
Yeah, as well as twenty percent of the top ranking boxers and twenty percent of the top ranking fencers. Meanwhile, it's a completely different story for the more team oriented sports like basketball or football.
So why do you think that is? Well, it ultimately comes down to how rare lefties are.
It's estimated that only ten percent of the people in the world are left handed, So that means that if you're a right handed tennis player, for example, you've probably only ever gone up against other right handed players, and the same is true for left handed players too. Right like ninety percent of the world is right handed, then left handed players are also mostly squaring off with righty's.
This was something I really didn't think about, right So the result is that when a left handed player goes up against the right handed one is just another day at the office, the same old, same on. But that's not the case for a right handed player. The right handers don't really know what to expect, and that makes it easier for them to be caught off guard. It
makes sense, like when you think about it. Playing baseball as a kid, if you saw a lefty throwing to you like it was, it just looked so strange totally.
It's almost like when a boxer throws, I mean left hook, you know, that old southpaw surprise. I don't know if that's a real boxing I think.
It might be like boxing to me, well, just like when you were a big boxer as a kid and left sure, but weirdly enough, some researchers think the main reason why left handed trade is still around today is because it's always granted this element of surprise and comba.
For example, there was a study in two thousand and five where researchers looked at the remains of primitive societies and made a breakdown of how many people were left handed and how many were right handed, And amazingly, they found that about three percent of the population was left handed in the more peaceful societies, but a whopping twenty
seven percent were left handed in the more warlike societies. Yeah, so, in other words, things, if you've ever challenged a left handed boxer, historically speaking, it probably isn't going to go so well for you.
Well, I'm not sure i'd fear that much better against right handed boxes at safe bet.
Well, there's plenty more where that came from, because today's show is all about the unusual advantages that everyday people enjoyed, from the high social standing of tall people to the surprising success rate behind your lucky rabbits foot. There's all sorts of ways to get the upper hand in life, even if you aren't left handed.
So let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh hot ticket and on the other side of that soundproof glass working the soundboard with his left hand today had press That is our brilliant producer, Loll. And I should say that Lol is not, in fact left handed, so this is something at least somewhat notable. So anyway, Mango, where do you want to start?
Yeah, and we've never faced a left handed producer before, so I actually do you want to stick with actual sports and talking about something I had always wondered about until this week, and that's whether or not home field advantage is a real thing, Like does the location of a game factor into an athlete's performance or do teams play the same whether they're on their own turf or not. What's kind of an age old question.
And if I had to guess, I'd say there's at least some truth to it. I mean, I know some sports leagues have regulations to ensure that playing fields are mostly the same from place to place, but there's still the psychological element of it all, Like you have to figure players would be more at ease in the place that they're used to playing.
Yeah, I mean, in a world the bathrooms, are they the best places to get nachos? The away teams not going to know any of that. But yeah, it's very, very true.
I love that your conception of home field advantage is knowing where to find that the tastiest snacks.
But you're right about a home field advantage being a real thing, and a good deal of why that is does have to do with psychology. So first I want to give a little bit of background. There have been a bunch of studies into home field advantage over the years, covering a wide variety of different sports, and the results have been shockingly consistent, like the home team wins more games away than away teams, and not by a small
margin either. In twenty ten, a psychologist named Jeremy Jamison put together a review of all the different home field advantage studies out there, and based on the combined data, it concluded that a home team will win roughly sixty percent of all its games its places. It's a little bit higher than I would have guessed.
So what's actually fueling that advantage, like you said, has something to do with the psychology of.
The players, that's right. So part of it goes back to what you allude to earlier, like the player's familiarity with where they're playing kind of feeling at ease in this environment. It tends to contribute a lot to the home field advantage. In fact, according to one study, if a team moves into a new home stadium, it'll have a weaker home field advantage until the players get acclimated to the new space. Oh that's interesting.
So you're feeling at home in your home field at some point.
So what else is a factor? The next one is something I know we can both relate to, and that's travel fatigue. Like I don't travel as much as you do, but it can get pretty exhausting trying to adjust to new cities and time zones and all the while taking meetings and missing home. But you know, imagine all of that, except in between flights, you play hours and hours of tackle football in front of like thousands of screaming fans. Like jet lag suddenly becomes like a million times more tiring.
Yeah, yeah, I do kind of want somebody to tackle you before our next movie, just to see for ourselves, Like.
Yeah, we gotta live by example here.
But all right, so you're saying there's a link between how far a team travels and how well they play against the home team.
Competitors. Yeah, it seems like the farther a team has to travel, the bigger the advantage for the home team, and the last factor at play kind of goes along with that travel component, because the other downside for the way team is that it can't bring its fan base along. Like a crowd's behavior has a major impact on how all the players perform. You and I know this from
going to Duke and having that whole advantage there. But you know, at an away game, most of the people in the crowd will be rooting for the home team.
Yeah yeah, and that obviously gives the home team a little morale boost, but I imagine it also deflates the away team, like it can't be a great feeling to hear a stadium full of people cheering for the other guy.
Or again. But you know, all the stuff we've mentioned, the crowd, the field, the travel time, all of that factors into the psychological state of the players, and that positive mindset is really the biggest contributor to home field advantage. If all the players are feeling motivated and upbeat about the conditions of the game, that's likely to show up in their performance.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, but I'm still wondering, like if this advantage is the same from sport to sport. Like I know you said that studies have looked at a wide range of different sports, but were some sports better for the home team than others or was it always pretty much the same degree of advantage?
Yeah, so I wondered about that too, and it seems like it really does vary depending on the sport. For example, there's a sports author named John Boas who took three years worth of win and lost data and he took it from four different pro leagues, so hockey, baseball, football, and basketball. Then he extrapolated how each of the different win counts would have been affected if the teams had played all of their games at home, so like no
away games at all. And what he found was that the NHL teams and MLB teams would have experienced the small boost from the home field advantage of all the leagues. They would have won each a little shy of I guess five and a half percent more games than they actually did, which is still nothing to sneeze at, particularly
if you got money riding on those games. But the NFL teams would have seen the second biggest boost about six point four percent, and then NBA teams would have seen the biggest boost by far if they had played all of their games at home for a three year period, they would have won ten percent more games than they actually do.
You know, I think about this in football. I feel like it makes sense because you think about the intensity of the cheering when the offense is trying to call plays or whatever, like whatever they do in that scenario, right, and it's hard for them to hear each other, and it seems like you could get them rattled. But do we know why the advantage would be so much greater for NBA teams, Well.
We don't, but I guess one of the things that Bos pointed out was that the playing dimensions of a basketball court don't really vary like they do in other sports such as baseball. And on top of that, like NBA games are all played inside, so weather is never a factory. So, in other words, the home, crowd and travel factors are still in play for NBA teams, but the environmental factor might not play as large a role in the player's mindsets as it does in baseball or
even football. Huh, all right, well, believe it or not.
Home field advantage isn't the only kind of location based benefit in the sports world. There's also something I was reading about this week called small town advantage, and the gist of this is that people who grew up in a small town, say like fifty thousand people or under, they will have a higher chance of becoming a professional athlete than someone for a more populated city or a town. This is something I've not seen before, and the numbers
behind this are actually pretty remarkable. So there was this twenty seventeen article in Pacific Standard that only about twenty five percent of the US population lives in a town with under fifty thousand people. Yet despite that, nearly half of all NFL and PGA players are from towns that size, and the same trend is present to a slightly lesser
degree in other sports too. I think it's like forty percent of NHL players somewhere around that same stat or Major League Baseball players come from towns fewer than fifty thousand, and for the NBA, I think it's twenty eight percent, so pretty interesting.
That's pretty crazy, especially since you think the opposite would be true, right, like the larger cities would have access to more equipment, maybe more competition, and more opportunities for players to be discovered.
Yeah, I mean, the truth is, it's tough to pinpoint why small towns make such great incubators for pro athletes. I mean, it could be there's something unique about the atmosphere of small towns that make it particularly conducive to athletic development. The close knit community spirit, or the level of importance that rural areas tend to place on sports. Maybe, but whatever first got the trend rolling, it's kind of become a self perpetuating cycle at this point.
Oh what do you mean by that?
Well, small town residents tend to know how many legends their areas have produced, like Bojacks. I mean, how many times a day do I remind you that Bo Jackson chain from the Birmingham area, right, you know, to Wayne Gretzky. And that makes the dream of making it to the big league seem all the more attainable for the next crop of players.
And it is something that makes sense.
So if somebody grew up in your neighborhood and you see them turn pro, then it stands the reason that maybe you could too.
Yeah, you know, I used to live in Greenville, North Carolina, and Kinston was right next door, and the number of star basketball players and football players that will come out of is pretty remarkable. Yeah, but not Bo Jackson, No, not or Wayne Gretzky. Right, But you know, there's one more sports advantage I wanted to talk about, and that's the fact that being short can actually give players a
big advantage in soccer. It's it's funny, but one of our friends kids learned from his doctor that he might be you know, six foot or whatever like these projections, and he was totally depressed because he would He was hoping you'd be like five seven like Messi or five eight, which is just funny to think about, especially for someone like me. But you know, it's kind of counterintuitive since bigger is usually better when it comes to sports. But in the case of soccer, being tall is only helpful
if you're a defender or a goalie. For the other positions like forwards and midfielders, the edge goes to the shorter players. So why is that the main reason is that shorter players tend to have better control of their limbs, which allows them to change direction faster than a tall player could. That kind of nimbleness really keeps defenders on their toes and makes it harder to box in a short opponent or to anticipate their movements. But that's not
the only advantage, you know. According to the Atlantic, studies have shown that tall players are called for fouls more frequently than shorter players. Huh. That could just be that the referees are associating height with aggression, or maybe the longer limbs are more visible. But you know, I'm not sure exactly what the reason is, but but tall folks definitely get carded more.
Yeah, and I know in other sports like basketball, it's obviously an advantage overall to be tall, But it is also interesting to watch. You know, when you used to watch guys like Shack play and they could just get hammered all day long and nobody would call.
Them a lot of times. But Iverson will pull someone down and get called.
For it exactly exactly. It's so bizarre to look at these stats, but you know, it's interesting to see how different levels of influence people can have over these advantages. Like with home field advantage, it kind of comes down to the player's mindset and how they respond to things
outside their control. And with the small town advantage, like that's something people could actually seek out if they were so inclined, Like if you had a young kid that wants to be a pro football player, you could move to a small town and theoretically they could reap the advantage of that. But now we're getting into stuff like height and the social stigma surrounding height, and those are things that nobody really has much say in.
You know, Yeah, that seems like a good distinction to make, and why don't we check out some of those advantages right after this break? And then.
You're listening to part time Genius and we're talking about some of the lesser known advantages that certain groups of people enjoy. And since we closed out the last segment with a short person perk, I think it's.
Only fair we balance it out and go for one for the tall people out there. So here we go.
Tall people make more money than short people. That's it, end of story.
So I hate this already, but I feel like you need to explain a little bit well.
According to a twenty fifteen study published in the Journal of Human Capital, salary rates trend upward right along with height in most Western countries, so much so that if one employee is four or five inches taller than another, the taller person would make anywhere between nine and fifteen percent more than this shorter whoa imagine being a seven fetter. It would be so rich. But put another way, an extra inch of height could be worth as much as
eight hundred dollars per year in additional earnings. Match that to inflation rates, Track it over thirty years, and you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In extra income just for being tall. So I guess, setting aside the sheer injustice of this all, I'm curious to hear what's driving this because I feel like this would have made sense like centuries ago, right when was the jobs relied on on size or strength or whatever. But it seems strange that the trend would continue in an era of like the desk job. Right, Yeah, like maybe someone who's taller can reach the high shelf in
the break room or something that's advantage. Height doesn't really help with Excel sheets.
Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense on paper. And you know, one theory is that employers aren't paying strictly based on height. Instead, it's that taller people are landing higher paying jobs because their height lends them to more self confidence or better social skills, which allows them to climb the pay ladder faster. Anyway, if you're angling for a raise at work, adding some lists to your shoes might actually help.
So think about that. I'm sure that's how Tom Cruise got that big payday. So, sticking with our theme of things that are beyond our control, here's another bombshell. I bet you never would have guessed their advantages to being attractive. What you don't say, mango? Come on. So what's funny
about this is that even scientists benefit from this. So, according to new research from the University of Essex and the Universe of Cambridge, the way that a scientist looks affects the level of interest in their work and their perceived credibility. As one of the psychologists behind the study explained, this is true because quote people partly treat science communication as a form of entertainment, where emotional impact and the aesthetic appeal are desirable qualities.
Wow, it's weird to think society might buy into an argument that the world is flat or some other ridiculous argument like if this scientist is just attractive enough.
It sounds a little like that thirty Rock episode where John Hem becomes a doctor and a Tennyson's writer, and like he's horrible at all these things, but people keep getting in the past because he's so handsome. But I actually clarified this with Gabe because I was thinking the same thing you were, and the link here between attractiveness
and credibility isn't quite what you were thinking. So over the course of six studies, researchers were able to show that scientists who appear competent, moral, and attractive are more likely to garner interest in their work, which isn't a surprise, right, right, But then the researchers continued writing, quote, the scientists who appear and moral but who are relatively unattractive create a stronger impression of doing high quality research.
So just to get this right, so the public is more likely to pay attention to the research of an attractive scientist, but less likely to believe what they're saying.
Like, is that right? Yeah, they're basically like Serno de Burger racking right. But basically, the next time the public needs to be informed about a scientific breakthrough, it's probably best to pair scientists to give a presentation, like an attractive one to win the audience's approval, and you know, an ugly one to give it credibility, right, the old Watson and Krik will what they call it, I think, so I have no idea for that's interesting though.
Well, since we're on the subject of scientists, have you ever noticed how we tend to refer to the male ones by their surnames, but we call female scientists by their full names, Like Darwin is just Darwin. But have you ever heard anyone just say Curi, like it's always Marie Curie.
Right, I know it's just making a joke about Watson and Krik, but like I know Rosalind Franklin's full name, but I know one of them is James, but I don't know which one.
Yeah, I mean, there's actually even a name for this bias. It's called surname bias. So basically, when we hear someone called by their surname, it tends to improve our perception of them. Maybe it makes them seem more important or dignified in our minds, maybe stronger or more imminent or something like that. But the main problem with this is
that we don't wield that surname bias fairly so. According to a string of recent studies, on average, and regardless of gender, people are twice as likely to refer to men by their surnames than they are women. And those findings hold true across a lot of different professions, whether it's politics, science, literature, Like the list goes on.
So how exactly does this advantage play on in real life? Like what's the payoff for being just being called by your last name? All right?
Well, just going back to the scientists for a minute, there was a study back in twenty seventeen where more than five hundred participants we're asked to determine who among a group of scientists should receive a half million dollars science grant. Some of the scientists refer to by their full names and others by their surnames. And, as you can probably guess by what we've been saying, the participants
showed a clear preference for the surname only contenders. In fact, those candidates were a full fourteen percent more likely to be recommended for the award. So if that same strange advantage is cropping up across all these different fields, it stands to reason that surname bias is a serious contributor
to the gender inequality in the workplace. And the ironic part of this is that, you know, the trend of using women's full names actually may have started with noble intentions as a way of drawing attention to the presence and the contributions of women, especially in fields traditionally associated with men. So the plan, though, it seems to have backfired since so many of us have this surname bias kind of baked in to us.
I mean, that's a little depressing, but I'm glad we're more aware of it, and I think I am only going to call Marie Curie Curi from now on. But when don't we switch gears and talk about a few of the more even handed advantages out there right after this break? Welcome back to part time Genius. Okay, well, so let's talk about advantages that are a little easier to come by, ones that aren't as dependent on chance or circumstances. Did you come across anything like that?
Yeah, I feel like I've got just the thing for you, because all you really need for this one is a library card. Now being able to read and having access to books are obviously big advantages in life, especially during childhood, and hopefully it's clear by now that you and I are big proponents of reading. But according to new research, simply being around books might be a benefit in itself, even if you don't actually read them.
So my first question is, are you sure we're supposed to be talking about this because my kids listening to this program. Yeah, just just sit near the books. But what's the advantage of having unread books around. There's something in social science called radiation effect. I think this is so interesting.
So that's when children grow up with books in the house, they don't read them very much, but still somehow benefit later in life just from having grown up around books. It's a really weird phenomenon, but there's a study on it recently by a sociologist at the Australian National University. Her name is Joanna Sikora, and along with her colleagues, she pieced together five years worth of developmental data on more than one hundred and sixty thousand adults from thirty
one different societies. These surveys were aimed at assessing things like literacy, competency, with numbers, even technology, and part of this was asking the question of how large of a home library the participants had during their adolescence. Some of
the findings from this were were actually pretty surprising. So, for instance, the participants who only had a high school education but who had grown up around books, they boasted better literacy, numeracy, and digital problem solving as adults than the college grads and the survey who had grown up in bookless homes.
Huh, that's interesting, And I'm guessing this all comes down to someone in the house valuing knowledge or learning.
Yeah, it ultimately comes down to why the books are in the house in the first place. So the lead researcher, Scora, sum this up well in a recent interview with Scientific American.
Here's what she said.
If we grow up in a house, in a home where parents enjoy books, where books are given as birthday presents and cherished and valued, this is something that becomes part of our identity and gives us this lifelong incentive to be literacy oriented, to always kind of steer toward books and read more than we would otherwise.
It's fascinating and honestly, I have so many books in our house that we haven't read. I'm wondering if it's a good life hack for you know, not having to pay for my kids college, So good strategy. On an opposite note, Gabe was telling me about lucky charms this week, and it's pretty much the opposite case, right. The advantage depends entirely on the charmholder's participation in it.
Are you saying there really is some advantage to carrying a lucky charm?
It sounds impossible, but there's a social psychology study from about a decade ago where participants all performed better in memory and dexterity tests when they were allowed to keep their lucky charms with them, and when the charms were taken away there's scores plummeted, and when the charms were returned, their scores increased again.
So then why it's like a placebo effect, but for luckiness instead of health.
Yes, sort of. I mean the researchers theorized that the people with lucky charms perform better because they stuck with the problems longer than those without charms. Because they believed in the luckiness of their objects, they felt more equipped and capable when faced with a tough challenge, and that confidence ultimately boosted them over the top. Wow.
You know, it's funny because there's this urge to like look sideways at people for putting so much faith and like a rabbit's phone or whatever the lucky charm is. But I guess there must be some reason why they believe in an object's luck in the first place, right, Like something must have convinced them. It's just hard to imagine exactly what that could be.
Yeah, I mean, I think it helps to remember that what we think of as luck is really more about brain chemistry and world views than it is about you know, chance or magic. Like our brains are hardwired to look for patterns, and we often have good incentive to find them,
like even if they aren't really there. For example, if I make a conscious choice to wear I don't know, a shirt with a bear on it, and then I end up having a great day at work, there's a part of me that'll take notice of that and link the two events wearing the bear shirt and then having a good day at the office. And then if I wear the bear shirt a second time and have another great day at work like that mental connection will become even stronger, and I might think there's something going on
and that shirt is lucky or whatever. You know.
I know we talk about a lot of business ideas, but like, just hearing you talk about this, it kind of makes me think we need to get in the bears.
I think it's gonna be our next thing.
But as bizarre as it all sounds, I have to admit, it's sort of comforting to think that there could actually be a way for us to kind of make our own luck like that. It reminds me of something I read in The Atlantic this week about the social advantage that comes with having pockets.
Mango pucket like pant pockets. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It turns out the word pocket is an Anglo Norman word meaning little bag. And when pockets first came on the scene of the late seventeenth century, that's essentially what they were, like, these small, detachable bags that were tied around the waist with a draw string. And it wasn't until the eighteen fifties, when clothes became more tightly fitted, that pockets started to be sewn directly into the garments.
And this new kind of pocket was smaller than the old draw string version, but it kind of made up for that by being so much harder to steal. Honestly, though, if you were a woman living during this time period, you wouldn't really care which kind of pockets you had so long as you did have pockets. And that's because pockets were a game changer for women. So it seems like such a small thing, but being able to easily and discreetly carry objects, you know, it is an advantage.
But before pockets came along, that really wasn't much of an option for women. Now remember this is all prior to the rise of handbags and backpacks, and so suddenly women were able to move outside the home because now they had a private space to hold, you know, whatever they needed throughout the day.
That's funny. I never really thought of pockets as a symbol of independence. But you know, if you can't have your wallet or phone or keys on you, like, you can't really move through that like public spaces. Yeah, it's right.
In fact, I don't know if you remember this, but there's a great scene about pockets and the wind and the willows.
Do you remember all the scenes from them or do you say pockets this month? Yeah? I know.
It's when mister Toad is trying to escape from jail after being locked up, you know, for joy riding in his motor car, and he ends up disguising himself as the prisons washerwoman in order to slip past the guards. But he finds out that the stolen clothes he's wearing don't include pockets. And so listen to how he takes the news to this horror, Toad recollected that he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him and his cell.
All that makes life worth living, all that distinguishes the many pocketed animal, the lord of creation from the end fear or one pocketed or no pocketed productions that hop or trip about permissively unequipped for the real contest.
Pretty definitive right there. So even mister Toad realized the freedom grind by pockets, and not just him.
So back in the nineteenth century you'd see posted advertisements for runaway slaves, and some of the descriptions would warn that just because his clothes have pockets, that doesn't mean he's a free man. So I guess we should be grateful for pockets, is what I'm saying. I'm just gonna keep saying pockets. But they give us this agency in public that was denied to so many people for a long long time.
Plus we'll else are you going to keep your lucky charms right? So you know, we start today's show talking about one on one competitions, and now it's time to close it by holding one of our own. It's time for the fact off. Okay, So I came across a bunch of different advantages this week that all center on the sound of your voice and how it can influence
the way people perceive you. So, for example, men are more likely to vote for men who have deeper, more masculine voices, and CEOs with deeper voices tend to manage larger companies and earn larger salaries. But there's at least one profession where it pays for men to be a little more soft spoken. According to a study outlined and New Scientists, lawyers with gentler, less masculine voices are more likely to win in court than their gruffer, sounder colleagues.
And the researchers behind the study aren't one hundred percent sure why that is, but they say it could be that the lawyers with deeper voices are perceived as being overcompensating or trying to sound masculine.
Oh, that's interesting, all right. So here's a weird one. It turns out that die hard opera fans have a slight edge when it comes to chemistry class.
This is my favorite.
So back in twenty thirteen, a team of chemists study the librettos of twenty famous operas, and they found that the effects of twenty five different natural and synthetic chemical materials were accurately described in them, everything from snake venom to deadly nightshade. Ring to the Smithsonian. The researchers hope that teachers will use the poison based plots to help the students better engage with chemistry, because if there is one thing teens love more than chemistry, it's gotta be opera.
So we talked about left handed advantages at the top of the show, but there's one more that's too random not to mention. According to a report commissioned by the AA Driving School, left handed drivers have a much easier
time passing their driving test. In fact, six out of ten or fifty seven percent actually, of the left handers passed the driving test on the first try, according to the findings, and that means southpause are a full ten percent more likely than right handers to pass on their first attempt, and as any culver points out for ABC News, that puts left handed drivers in good company with famous lefty drivers, including Buzz Aldrin and none other than Chewbacco himself,
who you know was also left handed.
That's right, all right, Well, here's one I was kind of surprised to learn. Actually, color blindness can sometimes be an asset in combat situations. The ideas that the condition forces a soldier to focus on patterns instead of colors, which can be useful for spotting camouflaged enemies in the field. So much so in fact, that colorblind units were reportedly used during World War Two to help identify snipers.
That's fascinating. So here's a fun one. It turns out that women are more attracted to men if they're holding guitars.
Which is why someone taught the house course in college called just enough Guitar to Serenada Girl.
That's right. I think the whole thing led up to playing that song Tangerine by led Zeppelin. But let me tell you about the study because it's interesting. A team of researchers in France hired this beefcake guy and over
the course of a single afternoon. They had him hit on three hundred women between the ages of eighteen and twenty two, and in each case, the guy followed the same routine, right beat for beat, He introduced himself, he told the woman like, I think you're really pretty, and then he proceeded to ask each one for her phone numbers, so you know, they could get a drink together. But
here's the twist. For a third of these encounters, the guy was carrying a guitar case, for another third he was carrying a gym bag, and for the remaining third he wasn't carrying anything. And wouldn't you know it, when he was carrying the guitar case, a shocking thirty two percent of the women gave him their numbers.
Wow.
Compare that with nine percent who did when he was carrying the gym bag and fourteen percent when he was carrying nothing, and it's pretty clear that music is the language of love.
That's wild though, Like thirty two percent to fourteen percent. It's not just like a small advantage, it's a huge advantage.
And nine percent with the gym bag because I think like they just think he's a meathead or something.
Wow, that's pretty well well It may not be the most surprising factor of the day, but you managed to breathe a little romance into the show, and for that ALIGNE, I think you got to take the show Mango.
Well played. Thanks so much and I accept this on behalf of everyone who's faked playing a musical instrument to get a date. But that's going to do it. For today's Part Time Genius from Will Gabeloel and myself, thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another new episode. Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
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