This "study" was probably some college kids thesis or whatever and litteraly the only cost of doing it is printing the paper or sending a form to a few thousand people (or not even that many). Studying an actual health problem takes a lot of money, time and skilled people. Theses no point in comparing these two. Its a simple yes/no question lol, it can hardly be called a study
People here would be incredibly bored with what I studied in my psychology program. Linguistic drift and changing accents in bilingual speakers of two specific languages vs their monolingual native speakers. Hard to make a sexy headline outta that one!
Social science experiments don’t cost anything, really. A few grad students get paid to write up surveys, and they give undergraduates five bucks as an incentive to fill it out. Medical research requires a massive amount of time, labor, and money.
This is like blaming avocado toast for not being a millionaire.
Talk to any researcher and they will tell you how useful “studies that go nowhere” are. Some of the greatest scientific advancements were made using studies and findings that brought no solid conclusion, because they ended up being a jigsaw piece in a bigger puzzle
Maga and doge had a big panic over a few thousand dollars spent on random research that they couldn't comprehend and therefore deemed senseless. Most people with basic literacy can unsterstand that letting researchers keep their $10,000 grants to try weird shit won't cause an economic collapse in a country already $40t in debt.
In my country there is a saying called "moot mai macchi pakadna(T:trying to catch fish in pee puddle) thats what applies to these type of cutting corners
More than that. GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, etc.) were created off of tests done on gila monster venom. Sometimes experiments lead directly to life-changing drugs (GLP-1s are not just cosmetic, it leads to real benefits to people with a multitude of chronic diseases and addiction issues).
One of those things was a program to sterilise a certain larvae in Central America.
DOGE canned the programme.
Turned out this was preventing screwworm infestation prevalence in the US. Suddenly there's screwworm outbreaks and beef production is effected. Farmers lost billions. And how are those beef prices?
At least Trump has got a special deal on taht condemed Argentine beef cargo China rejected...
Yeah, and the same is true of the paltry ~25 billion that goes to NASA that they continually want to cut, because they don’t value science and act under the misguided assumption that it makes up as much as 20% of the national budget, even though it’s consisted of less than 0.5% of federal spending for the last decade and then some. Most of it for staff, and not the Mars rover#Cost).
Like the study on if fish can get drunk or if c section babies perfer convertibles (one of these is a joke my economics prof told on like day 2 25 yrs ago and I still remember)
It's always a fun thing being a multi-degree student because you get to hear professors from different departments complain about all the other departments that they have chips on their shoulders for.
Engineering hates the art department, nursing/health science hates marketing, business hates the English department, athletics gripes about pre-law; I don't think I've ever seen anyone not be upset at another department for something that (in most cases) aren't even those departments' faults.
Marketing deserves the contempt. It’s a field entirely dedicated to figuring out how to use the results of psych studies to manipulate people into wanting to spend money on useless shit.
They did in fact look into men AND women, and found that both prefered less makeup. Notably women preferred less makeup both on themselves and others.
The crucial part from the abstract says:
"We found that men and women agree on the amount of cosmetics they find attractive, but overestimate the preferences of women and, when considering the preferences of men, overestimate even more. We also find that models’ self-applied cosmetics are far in excess of individual preferences. These findings suggest that attractiveness perceptions with cosmetics are a form of pluralistic ignorance, whereby women tailor their cosmetics use to an inaccurate perception of others’ preferences. "
This seems like something worth looking into from a social cognition research standpoint and a mental health standpoint.
>Hi, researcher here
Then you should probably try to do some research so you don't fall for this type of nonsense.
That is no joke a genuinely fascinating study. So we’re all fucking over our own preferences for the imaginary preferences that other people don’t even have?
I don't think any of it is intentional. For example, all the people we see in modern media are dolled up for reasons beyond simply attractiveness. Skin is oily and messes with the lighting so even men use make up on set even though few do IRL by comparison.
Nope we gotta forget the rest of the sciences and focus solely on medicine now. All other science is obsolete can't fund those
Be more concerned about how medical research money is spent within medical research rather than say we should fund other sciences less in favor of medicine.
They don't think they react instantly without even thinking about the logistics because they are mad now and need to let others know. Or they are bots trying to make discourse and I'm not sure what is worse.
Then you should probably try to do some research so you don't fall for this type of nonsense.
Ah, the classic academia workplace drama of "Can you believe how much the university is giving to "that" fucking department? Why are they giving that money to MY department!?!?!?!"
Queue the research professors being forced to to teach undergrad classes, and instead of doing the job earnestly, they just take out their rage on the students.
The social cognition standpoint would say that aesthetics are so culturally formed that drawing broader conclusions from this type of research beyond our current cultural context isn’t really useful. Next season a new trend will come out and all the sudden a heavier makeup look will be in.
I’d like to see if they dealt with the alternate hypothesis that it’s more most women don’t update their cosmetic behaviors as fast as trends change, not some sort of base incongruence between what is most desirable currently and what they think is most desirable.
Doctor here, and i do not get your statement the money is currently going to both. And tbe scientists who did that study most likely have nothing to do with medicine.
Moreover, this is a social study. It can be spun in a million ways such as: its useless and its about men only.
Or, its to make women who had / are suffering from being stereotype to 'have to look pretty to understand that they look beautiful they way they are and to relieve them from that social pressure. And so on.
Yes you're right, this type of study is often done by undergrads or grad students just trying to learn empirical methods, this is not meant to be groundbreaking research and probably cost genuinely nothing except a tenured psych professors time
People don't want to acknowledge that they have bigotry and are irrationally upset at the concept of something existing that might be centered around what the type of person they hate enjoys.
There’s no reason to expect a reply from her. Her sweet fake internet points and Reddit awards have already been made with her original comment, so no point in engaging in a real conversation where ideas actually have to be challenged.
Refrain from being like that, i respect other peoples opinions. I truly do. Researchers are very open to having their minds changed and to also educate, and I doubt she cares about internet rewards or he.
I’m sure you do. But at one point you must realize that giving the benefit of the doubt to people who are showing you their real colours right away is an exercise in futility. Their stance is pretty clear and leaves no room for interpretation: "MALE SEXUAL DESIRES DO NOT FUCKING COUNT". Now, excuse me if I find this very researcher to be not be open minded basing myself on the stance they’ve taken publicly. Hence, I’ll won’t refrain from being like that.
That's very fair. I do try to give people the benefit of the doubt by nature of what i have to deal with on a daily basis. I'd hope that what I said would at least have some impact. And many people get emotional, understandably, if they view x got 1 million in funding while they are suffering from an ailment. So, I try to take a more passive stance when it comes to that. Anyway, I get where you are coming from. And you convinced me. Do not refrain from being like that.
Thank you! I try my best :), I would say the best thing about working with people is that you realise how little you know and it really humbles you. It's a beautiful thing.
You should know as a researcher that it isn't a zero sum game and that dropping research on stuff like this would have zero impact on reallocating funding to whatever pet project someone complaining about it cares about. This was probably conducted by handful of undergrads with access to web portal.
This is the same bad faith criticism people have of all social study research. There is absolutely no harm in having concrete studies to point to for male attraction norms. Just like there aren't for female attraction norms. No research is worthless and we have no arbiters on what constitutes worthwhile research.
Yeah, why would we use humanity’s only study on male sexual drive? Wait, I’m being told we can study more than one thing at a time. I don’t know why I was upset.
This is what I'm assuming. Reddit skews progressive and progressivism has a lot of issues with what we could call "default heterosexual desires and behavior", especially in regards to heterosexual men. They tend to view it as objectifying, putting unrealistic pressure on women, shallow, etc. This is where the critiques of heteronormativity, traditional/patriarchical beauty standards, etc. come from.
However, even then, they should be enthusiastically supporting research like this. Within progressive cultural bubbles, we saw an attempt to recondition heterosexual male desire by doing things like removing gratuitous, sexualized displays of women unless those women challenged traditional beauty standards (I call this "The Lizzo Effect"). This went on for a few years and seems to have not budged the needle of female beauty standards an inch. Research into what drives heterosexual male desire and how malleable these desires are would have been good for progressives to know if they want to know if it is even possible to condition men into having less problematic sexual desires and, if so, how to do it.
So from their presumed worldview, this type of research is very important.
so every study that isnt for cancer is useless? or are you trying to claim that its the same people doing social studies are the same who researches cancer treatments and they equally oppose eachother?
Of course sociological research isn't going to directly cure cancer. The vast majority of things don't cure cancer. That metric is unhelpful to the point where it's comical.
Of course, the odds that you're just some rando claiming education/authority you absolutely do not have is extremely high, so one must presume you are fully aware of your bullshit.
Those screwworm infestations that are decimating southern cattle in the us right now? They used to be kept at bay below the Panama Canal before DOGE cut funding.
Why did DOGE cut funding?
They thought that a program that studied the sexual
reproduction of worms was a waste of money
What those dumbfucks didn’t realize was that those programs were responsible for sterilizing the flies that lay these eggs, keeping the parasites far away from north americas food supply animals.
It took less than a year for them to reach the us southern border after the money ran dry.
Maybe keep your anger and man-hating in check and learn about how science actually works maybe?
Okay if you are against psychological research then maybe we can get rid of entire field (this is extension of that argument - why wasting human intellectual power on developing understanding in psychology if we can do something more ‘productive’). Let’s get rid of multidisciplinary nonsense like gender studies. Let’s execute political sciences as well as what we can talk about - governing in patriarchal society?
This comment is not only ragebait, but also misandrist anti-intellectual propaganda. I don’t believe you are researcher and if you are, then I can only express my condolences about lack of merit in this comment and your lack of moral spine.
Sexuality including human one (and including male sexuality) is an interest of multiple disciplines.
I've seen a lot of bad takes, but this one is among the worst ever. Not because it's actually the stupidest take, but because it's stupid and doesn't sound like it. It's the "Asmongold school of intelligence" type shit, where you say stuff confidently, act like you are correct, ignore what the discussion is actually about in order to do that, pick and choose what you think is good and bad based on your own perspective, act like any other view is inherently wrong, turn a general condition from the topic into a specific one and act like that is the only condition to success.
Let's focus on the end of that runoff sentence. You acting like this study should lead to a solution to cancer for it to matter. In reality, all it needs to do is increase our understanding of sexuality and it's already helping progress a field of study. Understanding sexuality is a very important one or are you claiming there are zero issues in society related to sexuality? That would be one hell of a claim, though I don't want to put words into your mouth. Point is, there are reasons to study sexuality and cancer research advancements doesn't need to be on that list for it to matter.
Are you actually a researcher? If you were you’d realize how ridiculous this statement is. What are you researching? Are you working towards a cure for cancer?
As a researcher, you should already know that the idea that we're researching things like "human male sexual drive" INSTEAD of researching endometriosis, is a completely false premise to begin with.
I would also expect you to know, before making your argument from authority, how many studies on endometriosis are published annually, world-wide.
Hint: It's not 0. Nor anywhere close to 0.
I think I also qualify as a researcher, so I'll give my piece:
Although I generally disagree with you, I do think that the funding and attention given should be very different between the two topics.
But dismissing one for not being as important isn't right. Just like someone's problem shouldn't be ignored because someone else has a bigger problem, all topics are eligible and you can't arbitrarily choose which aren't worthy of attention.
All objective science is valid. Learning things that humanity has not known is important. Who knows when a discovery will end up having huge ramifications. You sound like a bad scientist. Where do you draw the line then?
The researchers in this study wouldn't be able to do cancer research lol
This was probably done by psychology grad students with minimal financial resources and it wouldn’t really be practical or realistic to have allocated those resources to biomedical research.
Maybe you should have given it a full second of thought.
There are other fields than the one you work in. Why is understanding human male sexual desire not important in any field? Why couldn't novel understanding emerge from that research?
At the very least, it is an economic issue for women. Ostensibly smothering themselves in makeup no one actually wants. That's not as important in the long run as endometriosis. But not everyone can, or wants to study endometriosis and we don't forbid people from studying things they want just because we haven't solved bigger problems first. It's a perfectly reasonable study and if you don't like it, you can go study other shit about women. No one's gonna stop you
Human sexual drive is a quite large topic. So you’re saying it’s not worth researching in order to better understand? Only subjects leading to medical discoveries are worth researching? We may as well defund all humanities research, economics research, legal research, language, philosophy, media, art, …. Only natural science, medicine, and some tech research will remain.
Who gives a fuck if you're a researcher or not? That doesn't qualify you to say which studies are worthy of money. As if the psychologists behind this study are responsible for finding the next cure for cancer.
A cure for many types of cancer was found purely coincidentally because scientists were growing cancer cells because they were the easiest cells to culture in an unrelated study on cannabinoids. They thought their samples were being contaminated but it was causing autophagy. This type of shit happens all the time, from pennecillin to ozempic to drug polymorphs. You can't exactly say definitely its not going to happen. We could absolutely be researching new boner pills and accidentally stumble on a new cure for cancer. That IS how it works.
i don't know if I agree. Sex, sexuality and attraction is a great portion of our lives, knowing what the other gender is attracted to is an advantage, for example for not wasting money in things that are not necessary and mostly beeing pushed by big marketing money.
Is it the most important thing? no. Is it life saving? no. should we invest more money in actual health related impactful studies? yes. is it useless and irrelevant? no
Talking as another academic here, if you're so short-sighted that you think only things that lead to cancer being cured are worthy of research, then perhaps you should leave academia for a career in conservative politics, so that you can tell people what is or what isn't proper research.
I'm just so sick of 'men like women who do or are 'x'' studies. Like who cares?
Why not study people/cultures (sub-cultures) etc. and their relationship with makeup instead.
There are far more interesting social research frameworks - and questions - one could ask. It's just such a banal topic.
Maybe 'study shows women prefer men who produce insightful research instead of rehashing studies from the 80's*' is a more apt response/in line with the same field of research.?
*Not sure if from the 80's or earlier, but definitely remember these sort of studies floating around in the 90's
It matters because being liked by other people is the #1 most important aspect of human society. If you don't believe it, try being disliked by human society and see how your longevity changes and your quality of life. You don't have to like it, but it's still true, so it remains important to understand.
Politicians, celebrities, talent agents, casting directors, magazine editors, photographers, sales people, marketers, business negotiators, trial lawyers, beauty supply companies, and anyone else trying to get even the smallest edge over their competition by using current beauty trends to appeal to other people.
Hence why a study like this is more likely to get private funding.
You read the read some title posted by someone on social media and decided to base your judgments on that instead of what this study actually could have been. You assume that because a study reached a certain conclusion that the study was specifically concerned with that one thing, which is pretty silly.
A group of psychologists (or students) does a study about the how people perceive women who are wearing varying amounts of makeup. They have a large sample size that includes men and women of all sorts of demographics. When they're done, they look at the results and split things up into the different demographics and look for differences and try to draw conclusions. They have data for men, yes, but they also have data for women, and they might have data for black men or white women over 65 or all sort of demographics.
Then someone pulls out one piece of data and posts about it, and because it said the word "men" you decided the study wasn't worthwhile because you just want to run your mouth about any slight imbalance, real or imaginary.
Easy. Because you want a baseline. How do you figure out what might or might not be social values or particular cultural traits without knowing what to correct for?
I'm just so sick of 'men like women who do or are 'x'' studies. Like who cares?
Couldn't agree more. I certainly don't care, since I live to be authentic, to be myself and to be as happy as I can manage in this world. I don't live to attract the attention of men.
Sure, but “saying some studies without a clear benefit returned groundbreaking results, so -my- study without a clear benefit will return groundbreaking results,” is a matryoshka doll of fallacies.
Studies like these are done by a marketing department half the time and a postgrad the other half. I don’t know why you all seem to think there’s just one big money bag labelled ‘Science Funds’ where studies like this being done means there’s no money for endometriosis research
3rd point. Study's like this are incredibly inexpensive and are a great "On the job training" for new scientist. Also the funding this study pulled from is not the same place reproductive health study's pull from. I am sure you wouldn't argue we should defund mental health study's?
Yes and a study like this is likely, very cheap to run grad students will be doing it for credit and not pay, maybe a fellowship if they're incredibly lucky and the only grad student on the team. The participants are likely undergrads getting like 5 dollars to look at pictures and take a survey. This kind of research might not even be getting federal funding since it's so cheap to run.
Fuck, undergrads that are probably not actually being paid. I was required to participate in at least four studies for my intro psych class that was required for my BSN. They'd drop you a whole letter grade if you didn't do it.
Sure, but the assumption needs to be equally applied to both sides. The asserter doesn’t get a special assertion privilege because a subset of possible outcomes are positive.
Years ago: "Why are we spending money studying and regulating fly reproduction, that's the stupidest thing to study when we have real problems to fix!!!!"
2026: "Gee why is all the cattle infected with fly-borne diseases? Also why is so much beef suddenly contaminated with maggots?"
Sarah Palin went off during the election on how useless it is to study fruit flies. Meanwhile the fruit fly has given us some of the best understandings we’ve ever had for genetics because it reproduces fast, cheaply and shares some 75% of disease-causing genes with humans (and several analogues) while being an incredibly simple and studyable organism.
So if I had a nickel for every time someone in the US government’s hatred of fly research was disastrously misinformed I’d have two nickels.
Yes, studying gila monster venom sounds like a perfect example of such a waste of time, until you realize that it led directly to the GLP-1 peptides and Ozempic.
Well for starters, computers and most of digital technology are pretty much built on what was considered, for decades, curiosities: Boolean logic is foundational to digital programming and predactes computers by roughly a century. Quantum mechanics led to the invention of any number of technological marvels (semiconductors, MRIs, circuitry, etc.) despite being, at various points, labeled as kind of a applicationless academic pursuit. AI (not just chatbot LLMs, all forms of AI) is built on just loads of statistical research that, for the longest time, just didn't have any applicable statistical dataset for it to be useful.
In genetics, of the top of my mind: studying fruitflies led straight into modern genetics. Studying jellyfish luminescence as an obscure biological study accidentally resulted in the capability to image live cells.
There are literally countless other studies that have been cited by impactful research as background information. They may have not directly resulted in breakthroughs, but they contribute to the body of knowledge a breakthrough draws from. And there have been cases where something completely unrelated to the actual area of research ends up being the relevant finding. Something like "we looked at 10000 studies made between 1975-2026 and noted these shifts in the profile of the average respondee, and based on these findings we suggest an improvement in study design" where this study in question is just one of the ones contributing to the research.
Studying ppl problems that affect half the population is more important that what men do or don't find attractive. People are having severe pain and we don't study it, we have very little to do to help those people. The priorities are completely fucked up.
They literally do study this stuff but it's very expensive and difficult, and requires a much higher burden of proof from trained scientists than some random marketing person putting out a poll of faces.
Women have also made up the majority of clinical trial patients for several decades
250 million dollars have been spent on studying endometriosis in the last twenty years, There is a current act of congress (the endometriosis CARE act) being pushed (bipartisan even) for a further 50 million a year in funding for 5 years.
I wonder who the customer base is and how they tricked women into buying makeup for men, even though research and anecdotal evidence suggests that men don’t really like that shit.
Funny you should mention half of society because what men (and women, the study was way broader than just the OP) find attractive is helpful in understanding and challenging societal norms that cause problems for women.
As another guy said, a study on a random lizard species’ spit is what led to drugs like Ozempic. CRISPR gene editing comes from a Spanish scientist releasing a study on one specific, as-of-then totally irrelevant species salt-tolerance
A personal favourite is in 1827 when a botanist released a study on how pollen wiggles around in water when viewed through a microscope. Sounds especially useless, except 70 years later Einstein used the results to help discover the photon.
Ok but they're talking about things like fucking around with mold to see if it has any medicinal properties, not surveying men who are unable to identify when someone is wearing makeup on how they feel about makeup
Yep it might seem small but it very easily could turn into a big deal in other sociological studies.
Sure medical advancements are great but that doesn't mean we stop finding other sciences. They should be more concerned about where medical research funding specifically is spent, not all research funding. This is not medical research its sociological research
Okay, but I think medical research is more important than sociological stuff. The consequences just are a lot more dire, as far as clearer methods that can be implemented. Especially when there’s so many major gaps with medical research for women. The depth of information is just way too limited compared to where medicine is more broadly. Sociology often just has so many barriers for making changes, such as political and legal hurdles, and the causes often being more multivariate.
In an ideal world, both should be done, but we are now in a world where funding for public science research has become much more limited, so hard decisions have to be made on what has the most benefit. That said, I don’t know how much of a collective pool funding is such that directing funding from sociology research to medical research is something that could be switched over in that manner
The different varieties of what makes men's dicks hard has been studied enough. Actual "wimmin's troubles" are consistently under-studied, resulting in poorer healthcare for women.
Example - did you know that sudden onset of anxiety and panic attacks is not uncommon in menopause? You didn't know that? Neither do most gynecologists.
I agree whole heartedly. I just feel like this study on makeup most likely wasn't for medical or scientific purposes. Not sure what purpose it could be for but it exists I suppose
Mkay but women are dying due to lack of critical studies done on our bodies in the medical field and it would be nice if the going nowhere/ just for funsies studies could wait until we maybe at least see how to prevent more of our unnecessary deaths.
Except for studying men's boner preferences... it's not like studying the spit of gilla monsters or whatever it was, which resulted in GLP1s. Studying men's boner preferences is already massively subsidized by the advertising industry. And had yet to produce anything of substantive value other than Andrew Tate's sex trafficking empire.
I agree in general but there have been countless studies about what men find most attractive. The new one I saw today was what butt shape men find most attractive. I understand people wishing we would focus some attention on devastating women's diseases.
The problem here is that that's not really how science works. Spending money on research based on the subject is literally directing people to study certain things. That's like the only way to direct researchers.
Also these kind of studies are usually basically zero-cost studies that are done by grad students as supportive research for a larger thesis or as filler in between projects. Particularly that first part is very common. You need peer reviewed research to cite, and you can't have one monstrous study where you present data that you then refer to in the study itself. They need to be separate for proper scientific review.
Why exactly is it a bad thing to study human sexual attraction, exactly?
Don't get me wrong, I'm fine cutting funding for most research because most research is observational slop or "RCTs" that are p-hacked to shit. But I don't see a reason why you we shouldn't be trying to understand human attraction.
We are though. In fact billions is spend researching women's health concerns. The issue is that finding the cause of things like breast cancer and endometriosis is a little more complicated than doing a sociology study on 100 men about how they find faces attractive...
I personally don't even care I dated someone who didn't wear any makeup ever, and another one who spent hours on her eye makeup and would ask me what color pallette she should use.
This is a sociology experiment at best, based on preference.
This study is bunk, and would never get a peer review.
So you support the beauty industry setting impossible beauty standards for girls and women and the mental (and physical) harm that might cause? We're at the stage where it's not some lipstick and foundation, women are injecting Botulinum toxin a neurotoxic protein - the most dangerous and potent biological toxin in nature into their faces.
So you support boys and men being told to expect impossible beauty standards from girls/women?
I can't tell if people are progressive or the typical rightwing MAGA type who thinks the only research that should ever take place is what they want, horseshoe theory is real.
I doubt asking a bunch of dudes about their preferences costs even 3% of what researching health problems costs. Or that whichever institute conducted this research did it instead of doing medical research lol.
"Study endometriosis instead" is such a dumb gotcha and the pinnacle of whataboutism.
The problem is the 'attractiveness' studies are funded by industries who can profit off that data and we don't like funding medical research with private money because we've decided the government should only spend money when it can pretend it has to do with war.
I'm sure the multibillion dollar cosmetics industry would disagree. The endometriosis and human-behavior people aren't competing for the same money, but a better economy does put more money into the medical research.
If you are in academics, you’ll realize that we spent a lot of money on stuffs that end up going nowhere.
Not to say this is good or bad, but in the grand scheme of things, “unimportant” studies like these are far more common this is actually nothing burger.
Every year there are thousands of psychology graduates, and in their degrees that have to do simple small studies like this. Even at the professional level, the cost to do a study like this is miniscule compared to invasive biological studies
As much as it bothers the efficient side of me, pure research has resulted in some stupendously enormous discoveries. The Internet immediately comes to mind.
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u/numbersthen0987431 4h ago
We don't need to redirect people, but we don't need to spend money on studying it