The Guardian has a report on a slightly odd study performed on Berkeley students. The actual study can be found here (PDF). Here are excerpts from the Guardian article:

When a young man masturbates, exactly how distracted does he get? An experiment performed on students at the University of California, Berkeley aimed to find out.

Full details are in a study that will be published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. Dan Ariely, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and George Loewenstein, of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, describe their arousing achievement in dry, formal terms: “We examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self-stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students.”
…
[The researchers] explain how they recruited 35 students, offering to pay each a small fee for the effort of masturbating while answering a survey. Each student was given a laptop computer with a keypad “designed to be operated easily using only the non-dominant hand.”

Some of the volunteers had instructions to answer the questions “while in their natural, presumably not highly aroused, state”. Others “were first asked to self-stimulate themselves, and were presented with the same questions only after they had achieved a high but sub-orgasmic level of arousal.”

The computer screen displayed “an ‘arousal thermometer’ with regions colored from blue to red representing increasing levels of arousal. Two keys on the keypad allowed the user to move the probe on the arousal meter to indicate their momentary level of arousal. The panel on the top-left occupied the largest part of the screen, displaying diverse erotic photographs.”

The screen also showed the long series of survey questions. Some asked about the attractiveness of different sexual activities, items and opportunities. Among them: women’s shoes; a 12-year-old girl; an animal; a 50-year-old woman; a man; and an extremely fat person. Other questions probed the risks the volunteer would take in order to obtain sexual gratification.

The volunteers were instructed to press the computer’s tab key if they ejaculated. None reported doing so.

Ariely and Loewenstein say their results are “striking” and more than confirm what most people believe about young men as a group - that when aroused, they (1) become sexually attracted to things otherwise offputting; (2) grow more willing to engage in morally questionable behaviour that might lead to sex; and (3) are more likely to have unprotected sex.

“[Our] study shows that sexual arousal influences people in profound ways,” they write. “Efforts at self-control that involve raw willpower are likely to be ineffective.” This is a dig at theorists - the ones who advise people to just say no - from experimentalists who are unafraid to get their hands dirty.

My reactions:
1. It speaks well of Berkeley that researchers from two other universities would come here to perform this study. Glad to know that when academics need willing volunteers to rub one out that they turn to us.

2. All joking aside, this is actually an interesting study, and the results, while intuitive, are still worth seeming confirmed in a seemingly rigorous academic study. [Although it was pointed out to me that 35 people doesn’t seem like a particularly large sample size.] If the researchers are ever looking for more volunteers to assist in this noble scientific cause, I think I might know where they could *cough* find another willing subject.

3. There are plenty of stereotypes about the differences between men and women, expecially as they relate to sexuality, and I think the researcher’s findings beg for further study of whether a similar effect occurs with women.

4. There are some obvious but subtle connections between this study and concerns about rape, date rape, or sexual assault. The researchers treat this subject with only a brief aside, summed up with this comment, “Indeed, it can create the perverse situation in which people who are the least attracted to their dates are most likely to experience date-rape because, being unaroused themselves they completely fail to understand or predict the other (aroused) person’s behavior.”

5. It is reassuing that both the Guardian writer and the original researchers treat this subject with an apropriate level of humor. The last line of the Guardian article is especially good.