And businesses. And everything else. That is the inescapable implication of the following findings from:
The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance [1], Nauts et al. 2012.
Recent research suggests that heterosexual men’s but not heterosexual women’s cognitive performance is impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex Karremans et al., 2009. These findings have been interpreted in terms of the cognitive costs of trying to make a good impression during the interaction. In everyday life, people frequently engage in pseudo-interactions with women e.g., through the phone or the internet or anticipate interacting with a woman later on. The goal of the present research was to investigate if men’s cognitive performance decreased in these types of situations, in which men have little to no opportunity to impress her and, moreover, have little to no information about the mate value of their interaction partner. Two studies demonstrated that men’s but not women’s cognitive performance declined if they were led to believe that they interacted with a woman via a computer Study 1 or even if they merely anticipated an interaction with a woman Study 2. Together, these results suggest that an actual interaction is not a necessary prerequisite for the cognitive impairment effect to occur. Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness. This latter finding is discussed in terms of error management theory.[Emphasis added.]
Men need to start hoping that biology is not destiny at least as much as feminists have always insisted it isn’t.
(The article by psychologists was critiqued by a computational scientist for its terminology. (No link due to complete paywall.) The authors’ response is here [2].)