It’s Official: Guitar Players Really Do Get More Chicks

From the continuing annals of social science: this time the journal Psychology of Music proves the obvious once again (which is what social science is best at when it “proves” anything).

Men’s music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context

Nicolas Guéguen, Université de Bretagne-Sud, France; Sébastien Meineri, Université de Bretagne-Sud, France; Jacques Fischer-Lokou, Université de Paris-Sud, France

Abstract

This experiment tested the assumption that music plays a role in sexual selection. Three hundred young women were solicited in the street for their phone number by a young male confederate who held either a guitar case or a sports bag in his hands or had no bag at all. Results showed that holding a guitar case was associated with greater compliance to the request, thus suggesting that musical practice is associated with sexual selection.

Plain English translation: Guitar players really do get more chicks. (By a more than two-to-one ratio over the gym bag in the data in the full body of the study.)

I imagine the field research for this study was amusing. Seriously: asking women for their phone number “in the street” is “a real-life courtship context”? I know “context” is important in French semiotics, but I thought French sociologists/psychologists would be better at this kind of study. Next time, sign up a bunch of American frat boys to do the field work in a sports bar, and see how that goes.

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