I always knew women would be the death of me
I've always known, deep in my heart, that women would be the death of me. Truth be told though, I always thought it would be one, solitary gun wielding femme fatale who simply had an taste for danger. Now I know the truth: all attractive women are dangerous. All of them. My misconception was due to art, while the truth comes by science. Thank God for science, which, truly, is unbiased, honest always has our best interests at heart. Take it from these wise researchers: Don't spend any time with attractive women: especially not alone. They are like black widows sucking at your souls!
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Comments
Science Journalism vs Science Research
@LabMonkey you are quite right: the study doesn't mention anything about health. In fact, the paper's only real conclusion is "During social contact with attractive women, moderate increases in cortisol levels may reflect apprehension over an opportunity for courtship."
One does wonder, however, why this simple study was not also conducted on women.
Science Journalism vs Science Research
Take a guess at which parts of this article were part of the actual study, and which parts can be attributed to the newspaper and science writers.
Certainly the headline: Beautiful women can be bad for your health, according to scientists
Probably the bit on cortisol that was mostly just read from wikipedia: Cortisol can have a positive effect in small doses, improving alertness and well-being. However, chronically elevated cortisol levels can worsen medical conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and impotency.
What does this leave us with? Men produce cortisol around women. Wow, thats just... so sexist and terrible and wrong. The problem is that this is an unsurprising and kinda boring result, and the newspaper clearly benifits from misrepresenting the content of the study. All it had to do was add a blurb from wikipedia at the end of the article, and then stretch that to build a headline.
It's interesting to me that journalistic integrity would have no issue with making a stretch that leave the researchers so misrepresented, trying to make the original claim (Beautiful women are bad for your health) would be destroyed in an article held to the standards of academic writing.