What Are You Thinking About?
Posted: December 3, 2011 Filed under: Students 4 Comments »BY KEVIN GILCHER
Sex, food and, sleep, we all think about them during the day admit it. A study conducted by Terri Fisher of Ohio State University set out to find out just how often men and women ages 18 to 25 actually think about these topics. How did she do this you ask? Well it wasn’t telepathy, Fisher distributed golf tally counters to 163 female students and 120 male students who were enrolled in a psychology research participation program. Each student was randomly given one thought category to tally. Prior to the experiment the participants were given questionnaires that measured things such as attitudes about sex, tendency to appear socially acceptable and eating and sleep habits. The students who were assigned to keep track of sleep and eating habits received different questionnaires that disguised the sexual questions so they did not know the main goal of the experiment was to test thoughts on sexuality. At the end of the week the statistical analysis showed that the difference between how often men and women thought of sex was not much larger than how often they thought of food or sleep. The men thought of sex an average of 19 times per day, food was 18 times per day and sleep 11 times per day. Women thought of sex 10 times a day food 15 times a day and sleep about 8 and a half times a day. Fisher found that no single variable which was determined by the questionnaires could be used to predict how often a male subject thought of sex. These variables were how comfortable a person is with their sexuality, unrestricted attitudes about sex, and how much the person wanted to be socially acceptable. However, the more comfortable a woman is with her sexuality the more likely she was to think about sex and women who are concerned with being socially acceptable reported less thoughts of a sexual nature.
This experiment was conducted in an interesting way the researchers were quite thorough but with an experiment like this the margin for human error skewing results is astronomical. When people are asked to keep track of something for twenty four hours they are likely to forget to do it. When it is an entire week and the thing being tracked is thoughts in all likelihood the subjects are going to forget to tally many of them. This is because most thoughts of this nature occur absent mindedly when daydreaming or they pop into one’s mind and out again in an instant. Fisher knew this and that is why she did hand out questionnaires to find out people’s personality types before beginning her research. It would be interesting though to see if the results would differ if the same experiment were applied to different departments in the school. Fisher works as a professor in the psychology department of Ohio State and conducted her research with students who are most likely majoring or minoring in psychology. The results may vary with different groups of students who perhaps have an art background for example rather than a scientific one, because each subject uses different parts of the brain. If the results were different then perhaps it would demonstrate that with an inclination towards the arts a person is more likely to think of sexuality or vice versa. Research on this topic is not very prevalent but with studies like Terri Fisher’s emerging perhaps the myth of men thinking of sex every seven seconds will be a thing of the past. Or at the very least maybe women will get their own fake statistic.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-debunks-stereotype-men-sex-day.html
I like this article a lot because me and my friends have actually discussed how often we think of food, sex, and sleep and what is of the most importance to us. However as the author of the blog commented, i believe this study had room for many human errors. Not only are people likely to forget what they are thinking of, I believe it is hard to track how often you think of something because it is hard to determine what counts as a “sexual thought” or not. For instance, something like a kiss on the cheek, is that a sexual thought? As the author said, most thoughts occur absent mindedly which also makes it hard to record because we don’t even realize we are thinking such thoughts. Although the study makes a good attempt to try and figure out how often people think of sex, food, and sleep, it is hard to say that the study is completely reliable.
The author’s idea that individuals studying different subjects, which use different parts of the brain, could affect the amount they think about things like food, sex, and sleep was interesting. That idea has never occurred to me. Being in a health psychology class this semester, I have thought a lot more about the topics that were covered in the class, but it’s interesting to claim that a thought about a specific subject originates in a certain part of the brain, and that just using that part of the brain more could lead to more thoughts about the subject.
I agree with the author that people are forgetful and often forget to do things, such as keeping track of thoughts for a full 24 hours or a week. I think, however, that if I was asked to keep track of thoughts about a certain subject than I would be more likely to think about that subject (which could skew the results of the research).
I agree with your thought regarding someone telling you to record a specific subject each time you think about it. This never even crossed my mind. It’s like what we did in class when we were told not to think about an elephant all any one of us could do from that point on was think about the elephant. In regards to these participants they are being asked to record a specific thought each time they think of it. This would make me think about the subject even more than on a regular basis contributing to the researchers hypothesis but for the wrong reasons. This is a tough study to run and I am at a loss for ways in which to improve upon it.
I really enjoyed this article and your thoughts at the end. I completely agree with your argument over human error. In most cases I would think that many of the participants forgot to tally their thoughts for an entire week and just made them up in the end. The researchers went to great lengths to try and cover as many scenarios as they could but no one can account for human error. I have no other proposition for how they could go about this experiment but it seems rather likely that participants (especially busy students) were able to remember to record their thoughts.