Fertility, Ovulation and Consumer Decision Making

people know what you listen to. Uh, you say out on social media, Hey I like stuff to blow your mind hashtag tripod. People can search the tripod hashtag and find new stuff because let's let's admit it, it's a Podcasts aren't the easiest in terms of discover ability, right, Yeah, there's so many of these days, and that's a lot of bad podcast out there, but there are some really good ones, and then there's just a rich variety. And what constitutes a podcast is it? Is it people having

more of a real conversation. Is it a type we produced product, is it all music or is it one of those silent podcasts that I'm hearing more and more about. Those are the best. It's just it's not even white noise, is just nothing, just absolutely emptyness you can just pour yourself into. Well. The one one of the ones that I saw at south By that really grabbed my attention was this it's pretty new podcast it just started this year called Slings and Arrows, and they had a guest

named Christina Duranti, and she is a professor. She's at Rutgers University right now, and she specializes in studying ovulation and how it relates to consumer decision making. And so I was just fascinated by the stuff she was talking about, and I came back and I was like, we got to do an episode on this woman's research. So we

took a eap dive into her cv. Basically, we read a lot of her articles in this episode is about ovulation, but then it's also about the research that she's conducted over the years how people have reacted to it, because

there's been a lot of criticism of her work. But also the real wrap around here, the real takeaway is that there's a sort of insidious marketing aspect to this as well, which is that, Uh, if you're able to track when a woman is ovulating, and ovulation leads to different styles of decision making, then you could potentially market in a manipulative way to women when they're ovulating to get them to spend more money on something. Uh. And

that was what Durante's whole kind of framework was. Uh. So, so for instance, like, um, you know these ovulation tracking apps, like my wife uses one of those. Yes, yes, I think I've heard of these. Yeah, so there's the possibility of using those to have like pop up ads or two for them to like sell the information of when you're ovulating to a third party. Uh. The the other idea here is that like, based on your purchase history, that somebody working in marketing might be able to figure

out when you're ovulating. It's real strange stuff. So I thought, this is something that we really need to take a look at. Um, and this would be just one detail of our biometric information that we're going to be increasingly totally giving to machines and giving to potential advertisers, etcetera. You know, pop up ads like Hey, I see that you're sweaty, maybe you stink, Maybe you should buy this product. Yeah.

I want to throw a couple of disclaimers in here up front, the first being I really wish that our colleagues Christen Conger and Caroline Irvine were still here, so that maybe one or both of them could sit in with us and talk to us about this topic, because they have just you know, having worked on stuff Mom never told you for so many years. They've encountered so many studies like this and have a lot of experience

with the controversy surrounding things like this. I think they could have given us a perspective on it that would be interesting, But I think this research is interesting enough that we should just go ahead and share it with our audience anyway. Now that being said, we're going to tackle the subject with the same level of care and decorum that we tackle any topic here on stuff to blow your mind. Yeah, and another note I want to say before we start. We're definitely going to address this

at the end. But these studies could be seen as very deterministic in that they seemingly propose that a single factor such as ovulation drives the decision making of many women, and I think it's worth stepping back and acknowledging that before we even start that there are many other factors that influence decision making in both men and women, right, And I think Durante would probably agree with us on that.

But most of all, it's important not to read this research and assume, oh, means that women aren't capable of making rational, logical decisions outside of their reproductive cycle, right, Like I could. I can imagine somebody listening to this and being like, oh, this completely confirms everything that I've ever thought about women, you know, and like, please don't take that. That's always the danger of with studies like this, right that, because ultimately, nobody wants to be reduced to

a mirror meat puppet or a hormonal meat puppet. Uh, especially if there's just one string. And generally what's going on with studies like this and any so many studies that cross our desks that that boil down the human behavior. It's about looking at one potential string on the meat puppet, and nobody wants to We want to be a very complex marionette pulled in different directions by a number of strings. And that's more in keeping with what the reality is totally.

It's just that when stuff like this gets published and then the media takes it and they kind of boil it down to reduce it to it's like the lowest essence. There's misinformation that goes around, and in particular, there's been considerable controversy around these studies as well, even causing CNN to pull one of their stories covering one about ovulation and voting, and we're going to talk about that at

length later. Some people have called the pseudoscience. Other people have referred to it as quote stupid, offensive, and sexist. I think that there is something of value here. So we're gonna look at this stuff. Well, first of all, we're gonna just establish the ground rules of what ovulation is. But then we're gonna look at these studies and we're gonna step back, look at the criticism, and then you and hopefully us together can kind of come to a

conclusion of what we think. All right, well, let's jump into it establishing just what ovulation is. Many of you already are are well informed on this, but we have we have both genders listening in, and we have people of different ages. So let's let's get down to break. Yeah, I'm gonna call this section awkward sex education with Coach Christian Seger. UH. So here we go. This is a lot of this information is right off of how stuff Works dot com, and we have many articles about the

reproductive cycle UH and specifically ovulation. So here we go. Women are born with millions of immature eggs and these are contained in multicellular structures called follicles. Now, each of these is about the size of a pinhead and roughly once a month, or actually it's about every twenty eight days, though cycles can vary. The hypothalamus in our brain sends a signal to the pituitary gland and that says, well,

you should release these follicle stimulating hormones. Now that's important because that's the first hormone that comes into play here with these ovulation studies. These prompt the follicles to develop into mature eggs. One grows more dominant than the others, and within two to three days following its maturity, the egg will react to the release of another hormone, and this is a lutinizing hormone. This stimulates the sex hormones needed for pregnancy. It pushes the egg through the wall

of the ovary. The follicle itself then sends out a call for an increase in estrogen production. So we've already got what like three different types of hormones that are being increased in decreased in various ways right now. Between their periods, women ovulate usually. Uh, Now, this is interesting. In the research it said usually a week before or after. And my wife corrected me on this and took out her little app and showed me exactly where it fell.

I think it's like it's sort of at the halfway point. It can be a regular though, uh, and it can occur even during a woman's period. Generally, though, most women ovulate between day eleven and day twenty one, counting down from their last menstrual period. So how do you know when you're ovulating, Well, it's supposed to happen on the four day of your cycle. It's the time when you

are the most fertile. And the symptoms include being able to feel an ache in the ovary area, a change in cervical secretion, a dip in body temperature and then subsequently a spike, as well increased sex drive, light spotting, a bloating feeling, and heightened senses of taste and or smell. Now, oral contraceptive though they can suppress all of these symptoms, and that's important to these studies as well. Now, how can everyone else tell when you're ovulating? Well, they can't.

Unlike many other species such as the noobos in particular, humans undergo what's called concealed ovulation, and most primates have semi concealed ovulation. Now, why their number of theories here? There's a parental investment, infanticide, reduction, sex and reward, social bonding, and there's even a theory out there that it's just

a mere byproduct of being a biped. Yeah, but like Durante and many of her studies kind of establishes this upfront in the papers, basically saying, like, you know, with primates you can sometimes tell that they're ovulating because their genitals are swelling, right, and so subsequent both male and female primates no and that sort of changes how they socially interact with another. Now, normally the one egg passes

from either of the ovaries through the fallopian tubes. This happens once per cycle, and then when or if two eggs are released within a single twenty four hour span and both are fertilized, this can result in fraternal twins, and we have a whole brain stuff episode all about how twins work. Uh, if you want to learn more, you can go check that out. Inside the flopian tubes are tiny hairs called cilia, and they helped pass that

egg through the tube toward the uterus. This takes several days and the egg exists in a perfect environment that provides it with the nutrients that it needs. Now, while this is going on, the uterus, which is prompted by signals released by the follicle that formed the egg originally, has formed an internal lining called endometrium. This is rich in blood and nutrients, and it's prepared to house and nurture the egg if it gets fertilized. Now, fertilization does

not occur. The egg disintegrates into the uterine lining that passes out of the body during the period. So that's the real basic sex said class uh, that we're going to introduce here. That's the science up front of like, here's how the body works, right, and we've related that there's a definite ebb and flow of behavior that's associated with this. Yeah. Absolutely, And that's where Christina Durante comes in. So she is an associate professor of Marketing currently at

Rutger's Business School. She's a social psychologist that's interested in the biology of decision making. Most of her research mixes social psychology, evolutionary biology, and consumer decision making. She was actually an entertainment marketing executive before she entered into academia, but now she focuses on women's consumer choices and luxury spending, family consumer spending, and how hormones like all the ones

we were just talking about, influence those decisions. Overall, her research presents a theory that ovulation leads women to prioritize the securement of genetic benefits from a mate who possesses indicators of genetic fitness. Subsequently, her research shows that ovulating women have an increased desire for short term sexual relationships with men that possess markers of genetic fitness. And so if you're wondering what that means physical symmetry for instance,

or masculinity or social dominance. She has a ted X presentation that is available on YouTube. It's from in that she actually references the Yurkeys National Primate Research Center that's here in Atlanta, and she's talking about how and often cases there there are fewer male primates than there are female primates. Uh. And when the females approach ovulation, they

become more aggressive and they even attack one another. And that's because they're becoming more competitive for reproductive of resources. And that is really the very simplistic, broad framework for almost all the research that we're going to talk about today. Now we've already touched on the fact that, yes, when when humans ovulate, there's not there's not like a drastic change in colorization of the individual. And yet we're humans.

We wear clothing, so this makes us, this actually makes this capable of any number of colorization and appearance changes. There are subtle ways in which we maybe do let one another know if we're ovulating, and we don't even know it ourselves. Let's take a quick break, and when we get back, we're gonna look at Durante's first big paper on this, which specifically talks about ovulations effect on

clothing choices. All right, we're back. So Durante, I believe this, So this comes from two thousand eight, and I believe that this is maybe something that she was working on, what like it might have been her dissertation, or it

might have been something she was working on in grad school. UH. She and others tested a hypothesis that women prefer clothing that is more revealing and quote sexy when their fertility is at its highest within their ovulatory cycle, and the results suggest that clothing preference shifts and could reflect an

increase in female to female competition near ovulation. So, going back to that your keys center metaphor of the primate sort of fighting each other, the ovulation, the feeling of intense competition with other females from mates, and therefore the desire to to essentially improve one's UH selectivity. Yeah, exactly.

So the methodology they had they brought eighty eight women in to report to their lab twice, and first on the first visit was on a low fertility day of their cycle, and then the second visit was on a high fertility day. UH. And this was confirmed by using hormone tests. That's important. We're going to come back to that later. How they track whether these women are ovulating or not is extremely important to how these studies get criticized.

So in each instance, they had the participants posed for full body photographs in clothing they wore to the lab, and then they had them draw illustrations to indicate on an outfit that they would like to wear if they had a social event that evening. They also took surveys about their relationships, their social sexual orientation, and their desirability. Now I want to read this part from the study,

the instructions on how they should do the illustration. Basically, they handed them a bunch of colored pencils and there's like a piece of paper that had like a pre drawn female body on it and it said this. Imagine that you were attending a social gathering at a friend's apartment tonight. From what this friend tells you, it is a large party where there will be a lot of single attract of people. The party starts around ten pm. Geez, it's so late. I know it's here we are. I'm

going to be in bed by eleven. Begin to decide on what you are going to wear to this party. Using the colored pencils provided, indicate on the paper doll what you will be wearing to this party by drawing an outfit showing where the neckline will start on your shirt to where the shirt will end. Also indicate where your pants, shorts, skirt, etcetera. Will begin and end. So

they had to these eighty eight women do this. They've got all these drawings right, and to analyze them, they ran measurements on variables such as the total amount of skin that was revealed, the sexiness and the revealing rating of the illustration, and a composite rating of all those photographs that they took as well their choice. There was a lot of like statistical stuff involved in there. I skipped over that because I didn't want to bore you

the audience. You know, there's a lot of math there. But if you want all this stuff is available on her CV site, you can read any of these studies. So they found that the choices that these women made were moderated by other factors beside fertility, including their social sexuality, attractiveness, relationship status, and relationship satisfaction. So, for instance, sexually unrestricted women showed greater shifts in preference for revealing clothing worn

to the lab when they were near ovulation. Now there's you know, in studies like these, they've got to do a lot of literature review up front, and uh, this is no difference. So related research they turned to indicated the following that women's mating psychology is sensitive to fertility status, and that ovulation could shift a woman's social motives and

behaviors in adaptive ways. Women may experience greater sexual desire during these fertile windows in their cycle, but the desire may be direct did toward what are referred to as non primary partners if their primary partner specifically lacks indicators they find attractive. So let's say I don't know you're married, uh, and you your husband doesn't have a symmetrical face. Okay, Uh, during this particular time, you may be attracted to people

who aren't your husband whose faces are more symmetrical. I think that's what they're kind of getting at here. Additionally, ovulation can include an increase and a woman's self perceived attractiveness and a greater motive for them to attend social gatherings. Hence this whole you know methodology of draw what you're

going to wear to a party. Other research has found that reward related brain areas of women experience more activation during the mid follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, So this implies that they experience an increase in desire for immediate rewards. Another study argues that women become more competitive

with their women during ovulation. Similarly, another study found that women closest to the expected day of ovulation were less likely to share a monetary award and more likely to reject a low offer to share a monetary stake specifically with another woman. So, as you can tell, there's a lot of research in this specific field about ovulation and

sort of social psychological behaviors. And I think already people listening to to the show here you're hearing these these arguments and you can already feel maybe a certain amount of of outrage or sympathy for outrage regarding what may sound like a sort of one string marionette um interpretation of human behavior, right exactly. And that is a criticism

that has absolutely been leveled against these studies. Um. But when you add all of this research together, not just Durante's, but this this other stuff, it suggests it seems to suggest that women are competitive for resources during the most most fertile part of their cycle. Okay, but remember how we were talking about those monkeys and how they could detect ovulatory shifts. What if it was possible for human beings to detect those in women based on their social behaviors.

So some women report that their primary partners get more jealous or possessive when they're near ovulation. So the question then is like, how do these partners like detect an extra variation and flirtation or what about this? What if men can smell changes in hormones through body scent. So several studies have shown that men actually rate the smell of t shirts worn by women on fertile days of their cycle as smelling more attractive than those that are

worn on non fertile days. This reminds me of the I think there's like a scent based speed dating. Is

that right? That I don't know to what extent it It lasted, but it was making the realms and various headlines if you years back, because the idea was, oh, well we have this acent is going to be such a powerful indicator that you should be able to at least weed out potential romantic partners just based on smell of and so if you know this, then the ideas that you want to make sure you bring a shirt

that you wore on the day when you're ovulating. I guess so we kind of get into one string marionette territory totally. Uh, So there's also another study. Here's a study that would should really be a runner up for the Ignoble prizes. A research study found that lap dancers earned more tips when they were near ovulation than other cycle phases. I believe I remember this study, and I

believe it did win an Ignoble. It didn't. Okay, all right, there's growing evidence that complete strangers can actually detect cues of ovulation in women. But I think, like what they mean here is that a lot of this is subconscious. It's not like I walk by a coworker and I go, oh, she's ovulating today, right, you know, It's it's like these subtle cues. Yeah, it's the idea. Yeah, this is a subconscious understanding of what's going on, as opposed to like

terminator read out of saying ovulating individual. Right, all right, So all of this comes down to this paper's hypothesis that women may alter their appearance to appear more physically attractive when their fertility is at its highest, or alternatively, that they feel more attractive near ovulation, and so they

put more effort into their appearance as a result. Now there's a third possibility to which is that it could be a result of the increased competition that I was talking about, so that women alter their physical attractiveness to enhance their ability to compete with other women for those quote higher quality mates that like genetic territory. Again, what made this study different from all the others was that it examined a larger sample of women who were both

partnered and unpartnered. And this was in addition to women who had and who had not experienced sexual in or course uh. And this was because psychological mechanisms regulating behavioral changes may be sensitive to sexual experiences, so they added

the illustration method. They also took into account the individual difference variables that we mentioned already, and instead of using counting methods to estimate high fertility days like counting down from when your period ended, they utilized ovulation devices to pinpoint and verify fertility. Again totally important because this is

something they attacked for later. The researchers considered high fertility to be no more than two days prior to their lutinizing hormone surge and no later than four days following their lutinizing hormone search. They did not include women who used hormonal contraceptives. Or who had irregular cycle links, or who had had recently performed childbirth, or were currently breastfeeding, or experienced dramatic weight changes, or used antidepressants or smoked

cigarettes regularly. So there's like this, why had variety of factors that they just completely swept out of the study because those factors could potentially alter the cycle. So what were their results? Well, they found this that women prefer clothing that is more revealing and sexy near the onset of ovulation, particularly when they're in mating relevant contexts. I guess that's shorthand for a party. At a party, they sketch sexier outfits when they're nearest ovulation. But the ratings

on the photographs didn't differ significantly. Women who were more sexually experienced revealed more skin on their outfit illustrations that when they're at high fertility than the women who were sexually inexperienced, And the results seemed to indicate that women who were more open to casual sexual encounters desired outfits that were more revealing, and they wore clothing that was sexier when they were at high fertility. This was preferred

by single women over partnered women. Overall, The researchers saw this as a reflection of an increase in what they referred to as intra sexual competition, but it was moderated by their clothing choice. Their thesis is that ovulation was the key variable in deciding how we look and how that contributes to the day to day changes and how we decide to appear attractive to the rest of the world. Okay,

so let's set up back from this big study. Remember that this all gets back to marketing, right, So if you are ovulating and somehow a marketer knows that, I don't know, maybe it's like a department store that you have an app of on your phone, or you've got some kind of subscription to an email service, or it's like, um, like an online clothing service like some of the people we advertise for, right right, And then of course, just the the very safe bet that a certain number of

customers are going to be ovulating when they view your ads or walked by your store or are in your store browsing exactly. So the idea here is that like, that's the best time to try to sell these products that would potentially be more revealing. So take it or

leave it. I don't you know. We're gonna go through more of this, but let's like always remember with these studies that sort of the context is that regardless of whether or not we believe in these studies, it seems like business people do and they're going to use this information to try to sell you stuff. Yeah. I think it's very important to keep in mind as well as just the normal important take home on any study we we reference here is that it's not necessarily the final work.

Now we've got another study here. This is the next one, UH, that she did related to this on ovulation and product choice. I think you did the research on this one, right, Yeah, And this one basically just springs off of what we've been talking about here. So again this is just talking

about how peak fertility and women UM affects choices. And in this case, UH found that the non consciously chose products that can hand their appearance, and this seems to be driven by this desire to outdo attractive rival women. So this study entailed three experiments to see how ovulation affected product choice specifically, UH, namely the degree to which peak fertility women chose products that enhance appearance. So experiments.

These experiments entailed a virtual shopping exercise and it charting of their ovulation. Uh. And a lot of this is very similar, very similar methodology to the previous study, except with a different specific focus. So in the first experiment, women chose a greater percentage of sexy clothing in this online shopping scenario and accessories items near ovulation. Okay, so that's the first level. In the second experiments, same deal, only they were primed to think about the attractiveness of

local men and women via photopriming. Uh. Women primed with attractive women chose significantly more sexy products near ovulation, and the women chose sexier products when prime desirable men. But these choices were not affected by their ovulation status. Interesting. And then the third experiment, same deal again, except ovulating and non ovulating women were primed to consider first of all, attractive local women, second unattractive local women, third attractive distant women,

or for attractive distant unattractive distant women. So again, the results indicated that attractive local women were the influencing factor here. So uh. The idea here I being, it doesn't matter what you know. A supermodel in New York is wearing and looking like but if there's some indication that this is what people are, this is what potential uh mating competitors look like and dress like, and this is how they appear here where you are, that that can have

this impact, that this can pull the marionette strings. Okay, so I could sort of see an idea here that like, even though you may not live in the big city, here watching television and it's like, I don't know, it's a drama that takes place in New York City. It's Sex in the City, right, and you see how those women dress, which I wouldn't be shocked to find out that the Sex in the City cast were like doing

product placement with a clothing that they were wearing. Right, So that is supposed to subsequently make you think, oh, that's how at these vast distance attractive women are dressing. How does that relate to how I'm dressing? Competition level? Right? But alright, so I'm gonna play Devil's advocate here. I'm gonna step out so immediately like what I think is well attractive quote unquote is such a subjective term. What

does that mean? Because we don't have like a universal constant for what attractive is so how does measuring that play into this? You know, I could see that being an argument leveled against this. Yeah, it had this. This seems to have a very like fashion magazine level understanding of what people find attract I mean, because a lot of this comes down to clothing choices, and one individual sexy clothing is not going to be the sexy clothing

of another individual. I could still I could still see within the parameters of the of the experiment how those levels could could come into play. But say an ovulating woman who's really into the punk scene, her level of sexy attire, the sexier attire would be different from the

you know, from somebody who's I don't know, into goth totally. No, I was actually thinking about this that like subcultures in particular, and and I don't know if this is something that Durante has taken to account at all in any of her studies. She didn't talk about it, but maybe it's

something they're thinking about doing. But yeah, like various subcultures have various definitions of what attractive looks like, right, and what kind of signifiers there are, and so yeah, I'm not entirely sure how that works out, especially like when they're doing the drawings. Will also say this, Like when I watched her ted X talk, she showed the actual images of the drawings that people did and the drawings that were considered, like the conservative drawings of outfits that

they were doing when they weren't ovulating. I, as a straight guy, was like, well, that's far more attractive to me than like these super short shorts and like halter tops that the the ovulating women were drawing. So like, it's all subjective, right, yeah, and and not only subcultural, but cultural in in general. And certainly there's a there's an argument to be made as with so many studies like what was the sample group here? Um? Were these just uh, you know, a bunch of of of white

women that you were interviewing here, white American women? Or were they different people from different races and cultures? So I will say that if you dig into these papers, like I didn't pull all of this for our research here, but she was very meticulous about how she documented demographics of age, ethnicity, sexual preference, all kinds of things, So, uh,

subculture didn't come into it. But but but yeah, so they did take that into account, and that's where she runs in a little trouble later on too, because she uh, in a voting study that we're going to talk about later, she wanted a really large sampling study, uh, and so

she did it online instead of in person. Before we get to that study, though, I very quickly want to hit one more study that she did in and this was it's not as related to the whole marketing influence argument, So I don't want to do as deep a dive

on this. But the the the paper is called Sexy Cads Versus Good Dads, and the idea here is that they conducted three different studies to show that ovulating women perceived charismatic and physically attractive men, but not reliable and nice men as being more committed partners and more devoted future fathers. Specifically, ovulating women perceived what she refers to

as sexy cads. But what is a cad? And so like their idea was kind of like she keeps calling it in the paper and also in this TEDx talk the bad Boy, like they show this picture of like a physically like a guy who's in great shape, he doesn't have a shirt on, he's got stubble name cad. No, but but oh, cad is kind of like a synonym for like, you know, like a guy who's like loose morals. What. I've never heard this before. I'm not familiar with cats man,

you haven't worked the street. Huh. I've apparently never been accused of being a kid's sexy cads versus good dad's um. But yeah, so uh. The idea was that these ovulating women found these guys to be more attractive as good fathers for their children. But wait, but then when they were asked if they would be good fathers for other women's children, they said no. Uh. And so this basically the breakdown of this without going through this whole paper.

They understood this as being evolutionary behavior related to an ovulating woman desiring a man again with those strong genetic traits that they might pass on to their children. So these guys were symmetrical, they were dominant, they were masculine looking, right, and that I actually watched um again in the ted X talk. She showed some video they hired actors to

play these guys. Uh, and the actor would do like like he was instructed to act like George Clooney when he was playing the cat okay, and he just like was like overly sure of himself and kind of suggestive, and then when he played the quote good dad, he was kind of unsure of himself, but was very like verbally obvious about the fact that, like he wanted to be in a committed relationship and that he was looking to settle down and he thought he would be a

good father at some point in his life. And so these it was the same guy, Like, it was the same actor playing both roles. Now I can't help but wonder to what extent, uh, this involves the very human tendency. I think there's ocur is a you know, both sides of the gender divide, this idea that that when you think about another person and you think about a relationship with that person, you think about ways that they are

going to change in your relationship. You know, she didn't get into that at all, but I did think about that, like the the I can fix him or I can fix her idea. Is that what you're kind of getting So that's what I'm getting at, And I can see where one could have that opinion. They're like, oh, well, if she were in my life, if he were in my life, then I can I can easily imagine how

we come together and change with each other. But then when you're thinking about somebody else, you're like, oh, that's a disast, right, yeah, that's it's a bad story waiting to happen. Yeah, exactly. And according to this study, how you think about that depends on where you are in your ovulation cycle. So it's interesting. All right, let's take our second break. When we come back, we're going to get into the one that got her into trouble. This

is the study on how ovulation supposedly affects voting. Alright, we're back. So this is this is not surprising, right that this would be the one to get her into trouble because we're already dealing with some problematic and some problematic ideas here that that that really provoke argument. And then you're gonna throw politics into them. Oh yeah, not only politics, but religion. So yeah, so again, this is

the one that had a lot of controversy to it. Uh. They took the ovulation behavior theory one step further and suggested that political and religious orientation is linked to reproductive goals and the ovulation cycle, and that changes women's views on politics and religion and subsequently their results show that ovulation lead single women to vote more liberal and be less religious and be more likely to vote for Barack Obama in but ovulation and women in committed relationships were

more likely to become conservative, more religious, and they were more likely to vote for Mitt Romney in women are more likely to vote than men are. That's just outside of opulation studies, Like we know that as a statistic, uh, and that makes them pivotal to anybody who's seeking office. Right. You hear about this constantly on the talking head shows, right, like the female vote or the women vote or whatever. Um In Romney was favored by married women, but Obama

was favored by single women. And it's been it's been a while, and boy did we go through one hell

of an election. Uh, just recently, so it's hard to remember this, But there was all this talk, like all this horrible dumb talk and like talk radio and CNN and stuff that it was like, oh, if single women are allowed to make the decision, like we're gonna end up with Barack Obama again, like that kind of thing, right, Yeah, And the tendency to reduce all voters to like either single either single topic, single issue voters or just like

single biological impulse of voters. That being said, I have to say Romney and Obama both very symmetrical individuals, both attractive guys. I would like to see more politicians hit that note, like really have that be like a key talking point on their on their campaign. I am a

symmetrical individual. Well. Several theorists beyond Durante and her her co researchers, have proposed that political and religious ideology are related to reproductive goals, and this is possibly because of an individual's mating strategy drives and that those affect their political and religious attitudes. Other studies have shown that making concerns are strong predictors of religious service attendants as well as what their social attitudes are relating to the legalization

of maryor wanna. So what they did in this one was they did two separate studies. Now remember what I said. The earlier studies they actually measured, you know, hormonally, whether these women were ovulating. Uh. In this they found participants via some kind of software Amazon has called mechanical Turk. I've never heard of it before, but they gave them small payments and they participated in basically surveys the women supplied their menstrual period information that was gathered as well

as their current relationship status and their demographic information. Then there was a scaled survey that was used to measure their religiosity. Second study pretty similar methodology, but in addition they examined political attitudes. They split them into attitudes on social attitudes or social issues, and attitudes on economic issues. And they said that the distinction here was important because research has shown that reproductive goals are related to social

political issues but not economic one. So following this survey, the participants were asked to indicate who they would vote for or who they might donate money to in the presidential election. And the essential argument here was that, first of all, ovulating women are more interested in mating while their bodies prepare for reproduction, and that sexual permissiveness is associated with lower religiosity and higher levels of liberal political ideology.

So subsequently, single women experiencing increased reproductive impulses as a result of ovulation will hold less religious and more politically liberal preferences because they are interested in mating. Uh. And then they also said, meanwhile, paired women with the same reproductive impulses want to prevent infidelity in their relationships because that may cause them to potentially lose access to the resources they have to care for their children in themselves

as a result of their relationship breaks. Like like that one right there alone, I was like, oh, so this is basically implying like a woman can't raise children on our own, or at least that that's an idea in the back of most uh women's minds when they're married. I don't know. Uh again, like super super subjective, I think, yeah,

and I can. I mean, it's obvious why this study did not set well with a lot of people because at its core, it is taking something as as serious as one's political views, and something I know often is is nuanced and thought out, something that you know, when we think about it, we think about all the experiences of the things we've read, our whole life is leading up to our current political viewpoint. But then to say, actually,

it's really more about your reproductive impulses. It's really about it's not about your your human view of the world. It's about your most basic animal instincts regarding the world. It totally takes out any kind of like complex decision making that's built into the human condition. Um, so yeah, I can see why people would be really upset by it.

We're not going to jump into that criticism right now because there's still one more study to cover, but we will get to the criticism, I promise, because let me tell you this, this thing got ripped to shreds. All right. Last study, this is the most recent one as far as I can tell, comes from and it's about money and status and the ovulatory cycle. So this is one of the more recent ones. It found that women's monthly hormonal fluctuations seem to have an effect on their consumer behavior.

This gets us back to the idea of marketing, right. I do want to add to that, Like with the voting study, the marketing thing didn't really seem to be able to come into play there. In fact, they like interviewed some political campaigners and they were like, how could we possibly It's not like we're going to knock on somebody's door and be like, hey, would you like to vote for our candidate? And when are you ovulating? Like you know, like that's not something that's going to come up.

How do you gain that? Ye? Uh. However, so this hormonal fluctuation and consumer behavior systematically alters women's positional concerns, which could be important for marketers, consumers, and researchers alike. This all this basically ties together all of Duranti's research until now. Uh. So, the hypothesis here is that that week long period near ovulation should boost a woman's desire

for status and subsequently alter their economic decisions. Uh And they found that women near ovulation seek quote unquote position goods to improve their social standing, but that this desire to improve social standing was relative with other women, not with other men. Uh. Other studies have shown that women do not always choose to increase their financials standing over

absolute gains over other women. Fifty six percent, according to one study, would choose to take less money for themselves if it meant that they would gain relative status when compared to their peers. So the idea here is, um, they have two choices. I get like forty dollars, but if I get forty thou dollars, my female peers get sixty dollars, or I get twenty thousand dollars. And if I get twenty thousand dollars, my female peers only get

thousand dollars. And so the research seems to indicate that fifty six would choose to take the lower amount of money solely so that they can make sure that their peers stayed beneath them. Well, seems like the thing to do would be to go to your peers and say, look, this mad genie approached me with the deal. Um, I an't we split it evenly? You know, let's come up with a system that works better for everybody. You know, you're not far off. We're actually gonna talk about that

in relation to the Dictator game. Haven't you guys talked about the Dictator game before? I want to say, you and Joe covered in a previous episode. I think so, I believe that came up. Uh, so that if you're not familiar with this, the Dictator game is, uh, this this game where basically you give people a pile of money, and uh, there's two players. The first player has the fixed amount of money and they're tasked with dividing it between their self and the other person across from them. So,

so let's let's say it's you and me. You're given a hundred dollars and you have to decide how much of that hundred dollars you give to me. Uh. And in this scenario, you're a dictator because you get to decide. The dictator can give as much or as little as they want to. That's hence the dictating. But the more

they give, the less they get for themselves. Okay, So a meta analysis of all the game studies done on dictator studies indicates that people tend to give to of the money to the other person if they're a total stranger. So in theory, you would give me somewhere between of the money in your pile. You're a total stranger in this scenario. Oh yeah, that's right, we're not total strangers. Yeah,

you would give me more. Maybe. Female dictators, though, typically offer more money than male dictators, and people offer more money to female receivers than the male receivers. Does that make sense? So you're more likely if you're a woman, you're more likely to give more money to the person across from you, And if you're a woman, you're more likely to receive money from whoever is the dictator in the game, regardless of agenda. Okay, so they used that

in this study. This was one of the three studies they did to sort of, uh, measure money and status. And ovulation. So they hypothesized that ovulation would alter the size of the woman's offer in the dictator game. Uh. And they said, we think what they're gonna do is they're gonna give smaller financial offers to other women, but not to men. Uh. And they were led to believe that the other participant was a study uh sorry, a

student in the same university as them. Now, when playing with a woman, an ovulating woman gave significantly less money than did those who were not opulating. Ovulation did not have the same effect when women played with men. Women who were ovulating gave significantly more money to a male player than those who weren't ovulating. In fact, they actually gave them more than fifty of the endowment. So I think about that they an ovulating woman with a man

across from them. They've got a hundred dollars sitting in a pile, and they say, I could give you some of this money. How much am I going to give to you? They gave him more than half. So they gave, they gave. They made it so that the the mail across the table from them had more money than they did. Huh. Because I have to say, at this point, I imagine a lot of you doing the same thing. You're going through all the relationships in your life and determining how

much you're gonna give them. And I feel like, like, like strangers, I'm probably gonna give anybody that I know. Everyone else pretty much, everybody else divided, regardless of agenda, is getting unless you, like you're my wife and she gets, I guess I'll give her, and maybe I give my son because was he need A five year old doesn't need that much money. But everybody else just fifty across the board. Yeah, that seems like a fair way to do it, right, It seems like the way to do it.

Uh not very dictatorial, but pretty fair. Uh So. But yeah, so so this is like their interesting like tidbit that they took away from this was just like wow, like like this really shows not only that there's competition between women, but that there's this idea that they're going to give

more money to a man. Uh And overall, the studies showed that ovulation didn't just affect women's choices when they're purchasing food or clothing, which you know we've talked about earlier, but it has a broader effect on their positional concerns and society. Uh, and that this particular phase in their cycle seems to lead them to jockey for position with

other women. Now, I do want to throw in here that in figuring out how much money of the genius gift I give to everyone, I'm not discounting the fact that yet there are plenty of men who would definitely give more than in an attempt, maybe even a nonconscious attempt to impress the the other person. I think that might be the idea here too. Right. Yeah, and and let's keep in mind they didn't measure men on this, and we're gonna get to this at the end of

the episode. But hey, surprise, men are just as affected by hormonal changes in decision making as women are. It's just women are hormonal meat puppets than men are, like hormonal, Yeah, yeah, totally. All right, let's dive into the criticism. Let's see what everybody really ripped into durante about here. Uh. And those of you who are listening who are chomping at the bit and they're like, oh, I hate this person. I can't believe you guys are covering this. This is the

section for you. So uh, in particular, that study about voting, which was done together with Ashley Arcina and Vladis grisk cavicious. Uh. That was heavily criticized and it was not well received. In fact, so CNN pulled it off of their site because they said it failed to meet their editorial standards, and people online called it silly, stupid, sexist, and offensive. Science bloggers got together and they dissected and ridiculed the article as poor science. They said that it made false

assumptions about human psychology. So there's a couple of like, uh sources that I turned to here for some perspective on this, not just science bloggers. Uh. In Psychology Today, Greg R. Murray wrote about it and he said, look, this study appears to be fairly typical social science, but it suffers from a lot something that a lot of people won't tolerate, which is the idea that biological factors

might influence men and women to behave differently. Yeah. Christine Harris and Laura mick As I believe is how you pronounce it, or maybe it's mixed. They conducted a replication study of it, uh, and their study was called women Can Keep the Vote. No evidence that hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle impact political and religious beliefs. Now, this replication failed to confirm two of Durante's three findings, but it did confirm that ovulating single women were more likely

to vote for Barack Obama. Okay, let's step back again. Greg R. Murray in Psychology Today, he says, Look, this is what science is supposed to be. This is science at its best. What it's supposed to happen is one study makes an argument, another study replicates it and tries to confirm it. And the fact that this replication study wasn't a complete and utter failure actually calls for even more research. And again he says, that's what's supposed to happen, Like,

that's that's how this system is supposed to work. It's not like a one and done deal. Somebody does a study and we just accept that is given fact. Yeah, this is something that's come up on the show definitely before. Specifically, I remember there was a study came out about the tartar grade being like and it's alien DNA, right, and these are water bears, water bears the client of of

ASA Baron, one of our favorites around here. Yeah, but this was an example where study came out, made got a lot of coverage and we even record an episode on it, and then some than some other researchers set actually their problems with a study, etcetera. And this is an example of science and acts, and this is how

science works. It's easy to lose track of that when so much of our reporting it really boils down to, oh, here's this new study that tells us how this thing works, which really every new study is helping us to better understand how the thing works, and in closer and closer,

with frequent missteps, towards complete understanding. Yeah, and I think I think we can say this from the position of people who work in digital media that covers science, that oftentimes what you get is the article or video or podcast is presented to you as if, well, if this one study was done total total fact. Right. This makes me think of an old Lewis Black joke where and I think I brought this up on the show before, where he's like, study comes out and it says milks

good for you. That study comes out and says milks bad for you, and then other study comes out and it says milks good for you again, and he keeps getting more and more confused and angry about whether he should drink milk or not. Right, And it's it's kind of like that. Every time the study comes out, the articles that are written about the studies present them as if like, Okay, here it is. This is the absolute fact.

Get ready to change your life around this, right, whereas it's more like, well, here's some research we're working on it. You know, science is a long term process. Um alright. Another person tackled this in The New Republican. It was a person named Charles Bethia. They looked at the study, uh and they said. Critics of the paper called it quote a footnote to the long and inglorious history of

sexist pseudoscience now. Ironically, one Rutgers professor said that it was another troubling use of women's hormones to exclude them from politics or other societal opportunities. Say, that's ironic because look back at our notes. Christina Durante works at Rutgers now, so I wonder if these people work in the same department now, and like, how awkward that might be? Awkward

coffee machine interactions exactly. Uh So. Another academic saw the study as a growing trend in social science journals of publishing research that is quote fragile, unreliable, that cannot be replicated, and does not generalize outside the lab to real world settings. Another referred to it as headline bait that is not obviously wrong. Now you're probably wondering, well, what did Duranta have to say about all of this? Well, she actually

defended her research. She conducted an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education to provide feedback on all this criticism that she was receiving, and I'll boil it down like this. She said she felt most media coverage of scientific work, such as the CNN article, only highlighted the basic findings of the paper and left a lot of room from misinterpretation.

That the methodology was criticized for only asking women their opinions once in the specific study, and Durante argued specifically that she was using that Internet panel remember that like Amazon thing that I didn't really understand. She used that because she wanted to obtain a large and diverse sample of women for the study, and the only way she could do that, given probably where where she was located

at the time, was to use the Internet. She also said the methodology was criticized because she couldn't actually test the hormone levels of the participants. So remember, like in all those earlier studies, they used like various scientific methods to test, you know, how they are ovulating. She said, there's a large body of research that's looking at ovulatory effects on behavior right now and it uses the same methodology, and those studies aren't being criticized. So why is mind

being criticized? Uh? And I think we should also remember that in all of her other studies that we've talked about here, that she has measured hormone levels in the people. Her interpretation of the data was criticized as well, because when you when you really drill down and you look at the data, it showed that a strong majority of both married and single women voiced support for Barack Obama. So again, this is something that we remember hearing back

in women love Barack Obama. They're gonna be you know, swing the vote, YadA YadA. Durante argued that, yes, that was in general, but the differences themselves arose near ovulation. So she was saying, yeah, if you look in general at how these women veered politically, yes, they tilted toward Obama, but the differences showed up when they're ovulating. Her final thing, she said, look, the door is open to build on this research line. You can replicate it and expand upon it, which,

as we know, somebody did. Uh. And there was one other exchange that was outside of this Chronicle of Higher Education UH interview, where she said that understanding the causes of behavior can help change it. So if we know that the ovulatory cycle is subconsciously biasing women's behavior in a particular way, it's important to know this so that women can d bias their behavior. And then this is

a direct quote. After all, knowing the causes of our behavior empowers us to have more control over our choices. So that is the gist. She's done a lot more studies, but these were the ones that were relevant to what I think is the most important takeaway from this, which is where is this all going? Well, it suggests that ovulating women are going to be more responsive to advertising,

promotions and messages. Uh. And then subsequently, Uh, these messages are going to emphasize, hey, if you buy our product, you're gonna have positional superiority over other women. And like we said, earlier. Regardless of whether or not Robert or I or you listening believe in these studies and and find them to be valid, there are certainly marketers out there who have read these and are are rubbing their

hands together and planning their their attack. Right. Uh, it suggests that marketers who can't ascertain a women's cycle information directly could use a twenty eight day marketing method based on their purchase histories. I think I mentioned that earlier. Using that information, they would then strategically send out messages that emphasize female competition, specifically when female consumers would be more responsive to these appeals during their ovulatory phase. Uh. So,

I want to just pause here for a second. Like, next time I'm listening to a podcast, or I'm on an app, I'm reading the news, or I'm watching TV and some commercials pop up, I'm gonna be paying attention for the ads that specifically show competition between women, because I'm curious if this is going to be a trend now that we're seeing. Yeah, it's interesting when you consider just like tracking not only what you're buying, but also

what you're shopping for. The I can't help but think of the interactions you see between Amazon and Facebook based on your your browsing history, Like I do one search for black Plato and then all I'm saying is his advertisements for black Plato on Facebook and Amazon is keeping track of what you're looking at when you're looking at them.

And now I don't know to what extent they're actually incorporating this marketing approach, but you can see where it would be very easy for them to to do it, to at least extrapolate a rough ovulation cycle for a given user based on what they've been looking at on Amazon.

What would be even scarier to me is, you know, I have never downloaded one of these ovulation apps, but I would imagine that the terms of service probably allow them to share that information with third parties, right, Like I'm not sure, but like so they could say, well, I've got information on Christina Sager, right, and uh, this is when she ovulates. I'm going to sell this to you know, Amazon, or I'm going to sell this to

like these third party uh Internet advertise users. So you know, it's it's that's the insidious part to me, And that's the part that kind of like really shocked me when I saw her present this information live was like, whoa that is? That is like a new level. And think about it, Like that's just one thing that we're tracking. Think about all the other things that are being tracked based on, like our browsing histories or like our our

mobile phone interactions. You know, you can and you can you can compare all these different timelines such as what's going on in the news, totally seasonal information. Uh really kind of breaks down our sense of autonomy after a while. Yeah, um, all right, I said this at the top, but I want to reiterate this. I really don't want the takeaway here to be something as traditionally chauvinistic as well, women can't be trusted because of their bodies, right, Like that's ridiculous. Uh,

this is interesting psychology and biology. It does not mean that women are incapable of making rational decisions though. Yeah, yeah, no more than than men. Uh for sure. Yeah. I think the advantage in examining this research, or any research like this, is to take it and compare it to your own decisions. You know, not necessarily to second guess

your instincts, but ask questions about your behavior. Um, you know, research on same male sex driven consumer choices have certainly forced me to stop and examine, you know, to say, well, why am I considering this album over and now there? Why am I considering uh you know this, uh, this,

this movie, this TV title whatever. Uh. So it's not about it's not about seeing the puppeteer strings and accepting them or even about breaking them, but figuring out, like what is the shape of your own autonomy and uh and and what are some of the many factors that are influencing your behavior? Yeah, I mean I thought the

same thing. I'm like, I have absolutely had moments where like, I don't know, maybe I'm sad or I'm in kind of like a different mood, and they go and I'm gonna do I'm gonna go to the comic books store and just buy a big pile of comic books or or I'll buy a bunch of records. You know, they'll they'll make me feel better. And who knows what kind of hormonal fluctuations I'm going through when that's happening. Who knows is actually important here because like maybe we should

be tracking that in men as well. It's worth remembering there's research that other hormones like testosterone and cortisol also have effects on important human behaviors. So look, men aren't off the hook here, uh, And maybe that's a future episode for us to consider. So if if you're interested in that, you know, maybe we can look into seeing if there's studies related to that. So that is the

breakdown here, controversial stuff. I think it's kind of interesting though, especially when you when you put in the business aspects. So what do you out there think? You know, you've heard these arguments, You've heard this research, do you agree with it, do you agree with the criticisms of it? And what do you think about this marketing? Like is this a valid route for us to be going down

in a capitalistic society? Which is basically like let's figure out how to aim like laser focus to their biology and that's how we'll get them to spend money to other contracts. Yeah, it's like hormonal mind reading or even hormonal mind control. Right, So you can let us know. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Those are all places where you can talk to us or find this

episode and download it. So check it out and remember Tripod month is going on, and I recommend that you try slings and arrows, which is where I learned about

Christina Durante's research to begin with. You can find this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and all other episodes, including videos, blog posts, et cetera, at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and if you want to send us an email to give us your feedback on this episode or others that we've recorded, to simply shoot us one at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is that how stuff Works dot com. The Big f