Attractive men bring out gambler in less-sexy males

There’s nothing like the sight of a rival to embolden a man, it seems. If you want a straight man to make a riskier play in poker, you should consider getting a hot guy to sit with you.

In what seems to be a kind of compensating behaviour, when heterosexual men see another man they perceive as being more attractive than themselves, they try to increase their wealth. They make high-risk, high-return decisions, says Eugene Chan from the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

He did four behavioural experiments involving 820 men and women. After being shown pictures of attractive men, the heterosexual men in the study were more likely to choose a riskier bet when given the choice than at other times, or than when shown a picture of an attractive woman.

In one experiment, some men were shown male models in Abercrombie & Fitch advertisements, while others were shown female Victoria’s Secret models. A third group were shown photographs of “average” looking people.

The participants were then offered the choice of getting $100, or taking a bet where they had a 90 percent chance of getting nothing and a 10 percent chance of getting $1,000. The men who saw male models were more likely to choose the risky bet than the men who were shown female models or mere mortals. And no difference was seen in the behaviour of the women.

The effect was greater in participants who rated the models as “more attractive” than themselves, suggesting the risk-taking was an attempt to compensate for perceived inferiority.

Read full, original article: Sexy men make others take bigger risks with money

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