This story from MSNBC is slightly old but funny because it comes straight from the DUH department:

This month’s issue of the Journal of Consumer Research features a paper titled “Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice,” which is a neuroeconomist’s way of saying that men don’t make good decisions while checking out pretty girls in bikinis.

Grunt! Me make good decision! Grunt!

Hence automakers’ penchant for placing leggy models in front of absurdly priced cars at auto shows, and the casting of three scantily clad women on that “Republica Deportiva” show on Univision.

Grunt! Me buy car now at crazy interest rates! Grunt!

Sidenote: República Deportiva is a weekly two-hour sports show on the Spanish language television network Univision. One feature of the show is to use three scantily-clad women as background wallpaper (called Senadoras). They rarely speak, but that’s not a problem, is it?

Virgil wrote of the phenomenon 2,000 years ago when he created the epic poem “The Aeneid.” When Venus convinces Vulcan to make some special armor, she

…threw her snow-white arms around him
As he held back, caressing him here and there,
And suddenly he caught fire — the same old story,
The flame he knew by heart went running through him,
Melting him to the marrow of his bones…
She knew her beauty’s power.

Sidenote: François Boucher, the French painter, did a painting entitled The Visit of Venus to Vulcan. We now know today that he was just a perv who liked boobies.

In the “bikini” experiments, Belgian researchers conducted a series of tests on 358 young men. In one test, the men looked at images of women in bikinis or lingerie and at images of landscapes. In another, some men were given T-shirts to handle and assess while others were given bras. Another batch of men was assigned to watch a commercial featuring men running over landscapes while other guys watched a video of “hundreds of young women, dressed in bikinis running across hills, fields and beaches.”

In each test, the researchers offered the men the choice between being paid 15 euros immediately or bargaining for a larger sum that they’d be willing to wait a week or a month for. In all the tests, the men exposed to the sexy imagery or bras cited delayed reward amounts that were lower than the amounts cited by the men who saw sex-neutral imagery. The sexy imagery did not work on all men all the time, but, as a group, men with sex on their brains settled for a less lucrative bargain, suggesting they were more impulsive and valued immediate gratification more than the controls.

“I observed in my studies that men are more likely to pick a smaller immediate reward over a larger later reward,” Bram van den Bergh, the study’s lead author, tells me. “Hence I do think that men might spend money on something they might otherwise not purchase. Men would become more impulsive in any domain after exposure to sexual cues.”

OddCulture finds this interesting:

In fact, studies have shown that sexy ads don’t really make men remember the product. We’re so lasered in on the sexy stuff, we don’t care what brand of beer it is, or how long it takes the car to go from zero to 60.

Although, we still remember the GoDaddy Girl and the Doritos Girl. And the St. Paulie Girl (any of them). The key to making guys remember a brand is to put the damn brand on the girl.

Science Theory Becomes Science Fact: Bikinis really do turn men into boobs!