Thinking While Masturbating

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A study of decision-making while masturbating might sound like troll bait for people who think the government spends too much money on science. Yet when prurience and preconception are set aside, as they were by the authors of this Journal of Behavioral Decision Making study, the essential question is intriguing: Just how does sexual arousal change the way people think -- and not just in some fuzzy, everyone-knows-that sort of way, but in quantifiable detail? 

To find out, psychologists devised an ingenious experimental setup by which young men could simultaneously answer questions and measure arousal while otherwise engaged. ("The keypad and the program that administered the questions were designed to be operated easily using only the non-dominant hand," explained the researchers.) The results were striking. 

In the heat of the moment, 65 percent of study participants considered women's shoes erotic, compared to 42 percent when unaroused. Some 14 percent could imagine having sex with another man, up from 8 percent; likewise, the number who considered the smell of cigarette smoke arousing rose from 13 percent to 22 percent, and 16 percent "could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal," up from 6 percent. 

"Can you count on their decision-making getting very different than under other circumstances? Yes, you can," said Abrahams.

Read about nine other examples of uncommon research topics at Wired Science: Chocolate-Bunny Boxes, Yawning Tortoises and Masturbation Distractions: 10 WTF Research Highlights