Women Smell Men, Drink More. What Could Go Wrong?

Exposure to male sexual scents (androstenone) influences women’s drinking 

Robin Tan & Mark Goldman
Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology
December 2017, Pages 456-465

Abstract: In a demonstration of a heretofore unknown motivational pathway for alcohol consumption, we recently showed that exposure to scents emitted by human females during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle could increase men’s drinking. The current study examined the reverse: whether exposure to male sexual scents (androstenone) would increase women’s drinking. One hundred three female participants were primed with either androstenone or a control prime (plain water) camouflaged as a men’s “cologne.” They then completed a laboratory assessment of beer consumption and related measures. (Nonalcoholic beer was used for methodological and safety reasons.) Results indicated that females exposed to the androstenone prime drank significantly more than those exposed to the control prime. Social and sexual expectancies taken subsequent to drinking (to avoid unwanted manipulation influences) were correlated with drinking in the primed group but not in the neutral group, supporting the idea that information-processing pathways related to alcohol use had been engaged in the primed group. Few females were ovulating, precluding assessment of the effects of fertility on this process. Because of the centrality of sexual signaling to fundamental evolutionary/biological forces, these results indicate a potentially powerful influence on alcohol consumption that calls for continued investigation.

Monday's Child is Full of Links!

1.  When women are infantilized, it is true that they are "protected," but it's not really a good solution. As is argued here: The Warlock Hunt.

2.  I was hoping that this was true, actually. A kind of economic "Darwin test," filtering out the idiots. But it was a hoax.

3. Might taxing tuition waivers actually help grad students?

4. Steve Saideman on the imaginary fauna that infest the minds and worlds of academics....

5.  Pitching for the Cardinals...forever #39.

6. Idiots welcome! You can write for the Guardian, about economics.  A response, in which what economists actually do is discussed.

7.  Democracy dies in banal assertions of administrative privilege.

8. CoHE piece on Koch Foundation.

9. A famous NC "yarn": Horace the Christmas mule. It has a sad ending, but shows that voters SOMETIMES get it right.

10.  Those Illinois bonds. It's not going well in the Spendy City. If it were a private firm, Illinois would be forced into bankruptcy by unpaid creditors. As it is, those creditors just have to learn not to loan anything to Illinois or sell anything to Illinois.

11. Our favorite headlines: "Loud orgies of Mexican fish could deafen dolphins, say scientists."

12. Clinton voters can't even stand the thought of talking to Trump voters.

13. Proof of time travel.

14. Old guy named Munger says "Avoid Bitcoin like the plague!"

15.  Peak Prosperity (David Collum) on the year that was. And some more.

16.  WTF? No, really, WTFingF?

17. Postal workers going "postal" is not that unusual, though it is sad. But since it was OHIO, the guy went the extra mile and did the whole thing...naked.

18.  Economics Detective on "Biker Gangs."

19.  This is very sweet. Nothing ironic, nothing hidden. Just sweet.

20.  This is your baby's brain on Dad.

21.  The REAL war on Christmas.


Grand Lagniappe: It's a shame to see how all the great child actors go to seed, worn down by drugs, sex, and hard living. Another example. Sad, really. Once hung out with Skywalker, now can't even a afford a handicapped walker.

Along those lines....some ageless icons are actually ageless. Or apparently so.

Monday's Child is Full of Links!

1.  Dude. You broke the law.  You don't like the law, get the law changed. Taunting the cop for enforcing the law is really not going to work out well.  Just another example of the Thing Itself. It's not the cop's fault.

2.  Trump's message to Arab oil barons:  Frack you.

3. Anthony de Jasay on France. And on the electoral systems, trade agreements, and Trump.

4.  If you pick a small niche of extreme leftist indoctrination, you need to be able to be very highly ranked to continue to attract applicants. The second tier (and below) of "Progressive Finishing Schools" are going to face enrollment problems.   The few schools that have focused on extreme rightist indoctrination face far less competition. Hillsdale still has an acceptance rate below 50%.

5. Why the net should be neutral, but ex post.

6.  This is amazingly messed up, even for France, which is always messed up.

7. The Intolerable commits the Unforgiveable: Trump defiles the sanctity of the Unicorn State.

8.  It's a trap!  Or so says Bret Stephens. Trump is driving the left mad, in a way that will cause the left to continue to lose.

9.  When they start posting lists of stuff designed to make our sons (in our case, 28 and 25) feel old, that makes me feel old.  I remember that listing for Nickelodeon, though. Those were some good shows.

10.  In which David Henderson owns his fanaticism.

11.  Here's a happy thought. Women are consistently less happy than men, until about age 80+. The life expectancy of husbands? 79. Nice.

12. Whatever "net neutrality" is, it isn't "neutral."

13.  This article kind of buries the lede.  The title given on the web site is, "College student arrested; tried to trade chicken Alfredo, Sprite for sex." Inviting hilarious comparisons to more typical dinner dates:  chicken Alfredo and Sprite? Man, you need to go to Ruth's Chris and buy champagne. But then if you read the article:  Ick. Not very funny.  Lots of people apparently got caught tweeting before they read. Then, on the other hand, what the hell were the police actually doing? Headline should have been: "Bored cops catfish lonely fat kid, eventually get him to proposition 15 year old in a way that never would have happened on its own."

14. An extremely interesting article on "Bitcoin arbitrage" and storage costs. Sent by the intrepid Chateau. Given the storage and use costs, Bitcoin is a speculative, not a transactional, play at this point.

15. This short movie was made in 1909. And it's interesting. Possibly useful for class discussion. Amazing.

16. My man D-Drez on Trump's trajectory on NK.

17.  10 questions women "should ask on the first date." Also known as "I never, ever want to get married. Ever." This article is likely just trolling clickbait, but it's still worth reading. A lot of people really do think this way. Not "I want a life partner" but "I want someone to validate my emotional attachments to nonsensical causes."  But then THAT prompted THIS. Goodness.

18.  Tear down those statues.

19. Oh, gosh. Child care is already very expensive. One solution would be to require a college degree for providers, thereby eliminating many poor women from being able to provide the service and dramatically increasing costs. Wait, what? Why is that a solution to anything? Except the giant surfeit of unemployable women with over-priced "______ Studies" degrees?

20. Those Aussies. Despicable Minion steals chunk of lawn. Then does taunting on Facebook. I have to admit, if someone were that obsessed about their lawn, I'd be tempted.  Chill, bruh. Weeds are your friends.

21. Los Angeles taxes new housing to promote the building of new housing. And for my next trick, I'll make ALL the roads run downhill, in BOTH directions! It's as if "Atlas Shrugged" was a documentary, not fiction at all.

22. The African Enlightenment: Interesting.

23. 10 reasons people fail in grad school.  Angus and I tried our best to fail, but we ended up failing even at that. Seriously, it was interesting to watch the way the people who were good at classes (not Angus and me) end up drifting away, while Angus and I emerged like phoenixes from our asses.

24.  Air travel cronyism fails in the U.S. Senate.

25. Game theory and dating apps. 

26. Poor, poor, pitiful millenials.


The Grand Lagniappe: Alabama voters, ignoring partisan affiliation, by age. (Note that the children under 18 that Moore has harassed recently were not allowed to vote, so there's a bias there)

Monday's Child is Full of Links!

1.  My unbelievably awesome Duke office neighbor Timur Kuran on preference falsification. How can it be that everyone knew that every knew and yet everyone acted like no one knew, until it came out and we all said, "Me, too!" On Weinstein, Franken, Moore (or maybe not?). Nicely interviewed by Virginia Postrel, by the way.

2.  Are you worried about the demand side?  Good, gooooood. I sense your anger. Use that feeling, and come over to....the supply side of health care policy.

3. Gig 'em. The 4 hour work week.

4. At least there is a bipartisan consensus among the elderly elected gents that female staffers want to see their little wrinkly "Congressional members." They're wrong of course, but the wrongness crosses the aisle.

5.  What is going on with Trump's hair?

6. Avocado's number! Zero! Zero pits, anyway. Better without that big stone.  And...voila! Capitalism delivers.  Better than the central planning solution: warning labels.

7. How is that middle class doing?

8.  Good news: It was just duct tape. Also, police conclude the woman probably was okay anyway, because she (1) is from Maine, (2) had a dog, and (3) had a roll of duct tape....

9.  I don't always agree with Andrew Sullivan. But I often do, and he has a way of getting to the real point of some hard questions. As, here.

10. Pharmaceutical flea markets in Venezuela.

11. Hey, bro! Where's my raise? A "Planet Money" segment.

12.  I was proud of this. There was no entry in "CEE" for "Division of Labor." So I did some digging. A while ago now, but still useful as background, I hope.

13. There's a pretty big difference between "I object to the 16th Amendment" and "Get rid of all the amendments after the 10th." My own view is that the 13th Amendment has proved itself worth preserving.

14. This guy definitely gets a lump of coal in his stocking. You can't troll IAWL, and you can't prefer Pottersville to Bedford Falls. You just....can't.

15. African and other black immigrants may not be welcomed by African-Americans. Or, they may be.

16. The "Top 10 'Brown Liquor' Christmas Songs"

17.  Daniel Ellsberg on stuff now.

18. Mapping ethnic patterns of urban housing.

19. The high cost of good intentions, on Econtalk. 

20. I'm willing to believe that quite a few academics really do fail to understand the public perception of universities as being wasps' nests of bizarre hatred of "normality." But reading this should solve that.

21. Chaining democracy looks like this. It's socialism.

22. KM-W and "The End of Free Speech."


Grand Lagniappe: The Pedant Revolt

Lord grant us honesty, but not just yet!

Great NY Times article on Mexico with the headline, Mexico's Government is blocking its own Anti-Corruption Drive"!

This of course is the ultimate dog bites man story, especially under the current EPN government. Mexico has long been a country with beautiful laws that are not worth the paper they are printed on, and EPN is notorious for announcing major reforms to great fanfare that go nowhere.

But on to the specifics. How is the government blocking the corruption commission, you ask?


None of the 18 judges who are supposed to oversee anti-corruption cases have been appointed by lawmakers. The prosecutor empowered under the new system to pursue investigations independently has not been named. And members of the citizen commission say they have been routinely shut out of discussions about big corruption cases.

“It is a bad joke,” said Luis Manuel Perez de Acha, a tax lawyer on the commission. “I was naïve when the system launched. I believed and had hope that it would work.”

“I know now that they are trying to sabotage everything we do,” he added.


Here's a good summary. The guy gets it in the end. The system isn't broken, it's working exactly how the government intended.


“The Mexican government feeds us placebos and we believe they will cure us,” said Juan Pardinas, the president of the Mexico Institute for Competitiveness and one of the chief architects of the anti-corruption system. “I drank the Kool-Aid and I passed the jar to a lot of people, believing it was a path to change.”

Mr. Pardinas has been one of the most prominent public voices fighting corruption, its corrosive effect on democratic institutions, and the lives it sometimes claims. He ultimately became a target of the spying technology purchased by the Mexican government to surveil criminals and terrorists.

“I killed myself for three years to achieve this, and it’s basically broken,” he said of the anti-corruption effort. “Well, maybe the system isn’t broken. It’s actually working perfectly to allow impunity.”

Monday's Child is Full of Links!

1.  Trumpy Bear. Don't miss the video.

2.  Or maybe Trump makes you sad. If so, there are always... Garbage Pantz!  Those make everyone sad.

3.  If you want to excel, you can't use Excel.

4.  It's important to understand the Nazi next door. Or, is it?  The embarrassing thing is that "postcards from flyover country" is being done with such breathless naivete. Or is it?

5. Save the internet, and keep it safe for one, or another, set of powerful interest groups.

6.  This is hilarious in many ways. On this blog, Brendan Nyhan as been identified as being so nice that he has his own label, "Stuff you won't find at BrendanNyhan.com." I have, in fact, called him "painfully earnest." And yet David Frum (another famously earnest guy) blocked him.  Excellent.

7.  Why tell fibs that can be so obviously called out? Have we all just given up?

8.  This story seems silly. The actual story is a bit more nuanced. The "story" of math does emphasize the achievements of white Western thinkers. That may be entirely accurate, but it also may not be. It is true that work of the high Islamic scholars is not often credited. Still, to the extent that the prof's message can even be MISinterpreted as "don't learn math, it's white" there is a problem. I don't think she said that, exactly, but that is what is coming across.

9. Nice piece by KPC friend SR, on the Indian judiciary. The less you use discretion, the more you have.

10. Michael Munger (not me) put this up. It is a pretty good commercial, in terms of weirdness.

11. So proud of Florida. If you are in the position of having to deny fake-humping a female mannequin with an ice-penis, you may already have lost.

12. Invoking a right or committing a crime?

13. Garrison Keillor is scornful of the idea that men should be held responsible for sexual harrassment. And now we know why.

14. Cows and chickens have beef.

15.  Will the music "business" find a new model? It would be ironic if the digital revolution moves the business model back to live performances in excludable settings, where ticket sales are the only way to get paid.

16. Bitcoin 10k.

17. On Venditio...

18. Drunk as a ....possum?

19.  Art Carden and sharing.

20. The great baby bust of 2017.

21. On Gordon Tullock.

The Grand Lagniappe: