Researchers at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada claim that women walking with a sexy sway may actually be sending out misleading messages to men; to ensure that only the males they are interested in are able to get close to them, according to research due to be published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Dr Meghan Provost and colleagues used motion capture suits to study the way women walked, and found that females are able to send out subtle signs to men they like, about when they are fertile, and are able to mislead other men into thinking they are fertile when they are not.

Saliva samples were used to identify to identify the late follicular stage and the luteal stage of their menstrual cycle. The researchers then discovered a correlation between walking style and fertility.

The women who were fertile walked with smaller hip movements and with their knees closer together. But, there was no difference between walks of women in their follicular stage and women using hormonal birth control.

In a second study, thirty-five men were shown video clips of nineteen women (who were not using the pill) walking; and were asked to rate how attracted they were to the women. Their choices were matched to the saliva tests, and contrary to expectation, the volunteers rated women in the less fertile part of their cycle as being most attractive; which prompted the researchers to retest the finding using two more groups of men.

Dr Provost said:

If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile.

An eye-catching walk would be too obvious, so women are thought to use changes in smell and facial expressions that can be experienced only at close range.

It would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility only to those men she believed would make a suitable mate. Then, if a man can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman’s walk from a long distance, a sexy walk during an infertile period would fool men that they were not interested in, but allow those men that get close to respond to actual signs of fertility.

So the advantage of having a less sexy walk around the time of ovulation is that it would allow a woman to hide her fertile period from undesirable men who might take advantage of her.

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology at 10:27 PM BST

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Psychologists have long recognised a desire in most people to be and look consistent within their words, beliefs, attitudes and deeds. This tendency for consistency is fed from three sources:

1. Good personal consistency is highly valued by society.

2. Aside from its effect on public image, generally consistent conduct provides a beneficial approach to daily life.

3. A consistent orientation provides a valuable shortcut through the complexity of modern existence. By being consistent with earlier decisions, one reduces the need to process all the relevant information in future similar situations; instead, one merely needs to recall the earlier relevant information and to respond consistently to it.

Within the realm of compliance, securing an initial commitment is the key. After making a commitment (that is, taking a stand or position), people are more willing to agree to requests that are in keeping the prior commitment. Thus, many compliance professionals try to induce people to take an initial position that is consistent with a behaviour they will later request from these people. Not all commitments are equally effective, however, in producing consistent future action. Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, effortful, and viewed as internally motivated (un-coerced).

Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating because they can “grow their own legs.” That is, people often add new reasons and justifications to support the wisdom of commitments they have already made. As a consequence, some commitments remain in effect long after the conditions that spurred them have changed. This phenomenon explains the effectiveness of certain deceptive compliance practices such as “throwing the low-ball”.

To recognize and resist the undue influence of consistency pressures on our compliance decisions, we should listen for signals coming from two places within us: our stomach and our heart of hearts. Stomach signs appear when we realise that we are being pushed by commitment and consistency pressures to agree to requests we know we don’t want to perform. Under these circumstances, it is best to explain to the requester that such compliance would constitute a brand of foolish consistency in which we prefer not to engage. Heart-of-hearts signs are different. They are best employed when it is not clear to us that an initial commitment was wrong headed. Here we should ask ourselves a crucial question, “Knowing what I know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same commitment?” One informative answer may come as the first flash of feeling registered.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology at 2:00 PM BST

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I used to think that Seduction was a science, and it’s easy to see why. If you follow a few simple rules, you end up with more love, friends and sex in your life.

But thinking a little deeper, any strategy I may suggest to you now will not guarantee that you the meet the person of your dreams, and it certainly wouldn’t work 100% of the time. Whereas if I told you how to synthesise some chemical compound, build an electronic circuit or even bake a cake; then so long as you take care, and have enough intelligence to follow my instructions properly, you know what to expect at the end of the process. And, as creator I would know what response someone would have – repeatedly.

However, if I were to write a play, compose music, or paint a picture then I will have had an intended response in mind during the creation process, but ultimately I cannot control what response you will have to my oeuvre. For this reason, I consider that Seduction is closer to an art than a science.

Whilst everything can be art, to claim “everything is art” is just lazy thinking. I could equally claim “everything is science”; since there is chemistry involved in painting, engineering governs much of sculpture and physics controls the harmonics of music etc. Although if you’re still not convinced, please contact me, as I have a dumpster full of art to sell you!

Now, I believe that there is a need for more serious study of art and seduction to be undertaken. Matters of seduction are too often relegated to the Humour section of bookshops, with perhaps the most serious studies being the “How to get your man to do what you want, whilst keeping him happy and upholding your Feminist principles” articles to be found in certain women’s magazines.

I would expect that art specialists would be perfectly positioned to tell us something about the relationship between biology and the erotic workings of the mind, because there are many great works of art of a sexual nature. Then there is erotica, and finally there is smutty literature of the type found in Soho sex shops, yet all depict essentially the same thing. More mysteriously, the people upset by this last category are often the same people who will gaze in wonderment at a painting of a naked lady.

Pornography and art seem to have gone hand-in-hand for longer than records exist, and with each new art medium pornography soon followed. So, perhaps originally, there was no dividing line, or maybe it just fluctuated over the centuries, as society wavered between repression and hedonism.

The Barbican’s exhibition Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now is curated by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein, all of whom seem to be well qualified and respectable curators. Thus, it’s disappointing that they have only managed to produce a collection of dry, uninformative pornography. Perhaps I missed something, but we learn nothing of the heritage of pornography, none of the art is put into context, and it’s not explained how the exhibited artists changed the circumstances in which art becomes porn or vice versa. Perhaps we’re just to assume that if Pornography is shown often enough, it’ll somehow transform itself into art.

During my visit to the exhibition, I found the other visitors more interesting than the artworks. The former being an interesting mixture of average people off the street, art anoraks, and the fetish crowd (complete with big boots, PVC clothing and outsize hats); whilst the latter consisted of a scant array of international pornography through the ages, and seemed to induce more sniggering from the visitors than thought provocation.

As someone who admittedly is still learning about fine arts, I left the exhibition without any clue as to whether a Jeff Koons picture, for example, was art, pornography or erotica.

The curators could have shed some light on why early pornographic films had a storyline and were very tender, yet so much modern pornography is just violent fucking. How does pornography relate to the films and TeeVee programmes we see these days? They could even have investigated differences between homosexual and lesbian pornography – but they’ve kept the exhibition almost entirely heterosexual, apart from a few early paintings.

So, ultimately, I’m not even sure why the exhibition is called Seduced. It would certainly have been more interesting if we had been seduced by it. But, unfortunately I can’t say I really learned anything new. Although I’m sure the fetish crowd could have shown the curators a few new things, given the chance.

Posted by Jonathan as Art & Literature, Reviews at 11:11 PM BST

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I’ve been asked to elaborate on the work of Dr Cialdini; so I’ll use the summary information from his book, to try to précis his ideas over the next few days.

Robert B. Cialdini PhD is Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, and has spent many years investigating and researching persuasion techniques. This culminated in his writing the book “Influence: Science and Practise”, which details his six basic social and psychological principles, these form a foundation of several indirect persuasion strategies.

According to sociologists and anthropologists, one of the most widespread and basic norms of human culture is embodied in the rule for reciprocation. The rule requires that one person try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided. By obligating the recipient of an act to repayment in the future, the rule for reciprocation allows one individual to give something to another with confidence that it is not being lost. This sense of future obligation within the rule makes possible the development of various kinds of continuing relationships, transactions, and exchanges that are beneficial to the society. Consequently, all members of the society are trained from childhood to abide by the rule or suffer serious social disapproval.

The decision to comply with another’s request is frequently influenced by the Reciprocity rule. One favourite and profitable tactic of certain compliance professionals is to give something before asking for a return favour. The exploitability of this tactic is due to three characteristics of the rule for reciprocation:

1. The rule is extremely powerful, often overwhelming the influence of other factors that normally determine compliance with a request.

2. The rule applies even to uninvited first favours, thereby reducing our ability to decide whom we wish to owe and putting the choice in the hands of others.

3. The rule can spur unequal exchanges; to be rid of the uncomfortable feeling of indebtedness, an individual will often agree to a request for a substantially larger favour than the one he or she received.

Another way that the rule for reciprocity can increase compliance involves a simple variation on the basic theme: Instead of providing a first favour that stimulates a return favour, an individual can make an initial concession that stimulates a return concession. One compliance procedure, called the rejection-then-retreat technique, or door-in-the-face technique, relies heavily on the pressure to reciprocate concessions. By starting with an extreme request that is sure to be rejected, a requester can then profitably retreat to a smaller request (the one that was desired all along), which is likely to be accepted because it appears to be a concession. Research indicates that aside from increasing the likelihood that a person will say yes to a request, the rejection-then-retreat technique also increases the likelihood that the person will carry out the request and will agree to such requests in the future.

Our best defence against the use of reciprocity pressures to gain our compliance is not systematic rejection of the initial offers of others. Rather, we should accept initial favours or concessions in good faith, but be ready to redefine them as tricks should they later be proven so. Once they are redefined in this way, we will no longer feel a need to respond with a favour or concession of our own.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology at 4:30 PM BST

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