guess what? monkey butt!

today i went to a presentation that covered two papers. the first paper uses a method called future discounting. you measure a person's level of future discounting by telling them to choose between, say, $25 now or $50 in a week. you have them make choices like this for a broad range of amounts and times (a week, a month, a year), until you've characterized their level of future discounting. generally smokers and heroin addicts, for example, discount future rewards more than other people - they prefer the bird in the hand to the two guaranteed birds currently in the bush. heroin addicts discount future rewards more and more as the time since their last use of heroin increases.

in this paper they characterized people's future discounting, then showed them a set of pictures. each set of pictures was of either people of the opposite sex or cars, and either attractive or unattractive people or cars. then the experimenters remeasured the person's level of future discounting. they determined that men who had seen attractive women increased their future discounting significantly (pretty women make me generally want things now), and women who had seen attractive cars increased their future discounting significantly (pretty things make me generally want things now).

there are obviously problems with this research (how do you pick pretty? are all the people straight?), but it's provocative.

the second paper was called monkey pay per view. the monkeys had to choose to look at one of two targets. for one target, they would get some juice. for the other target, they would get some juice and see a picture. some pictures, like those with monkey butt, were valuable to the monkeys, and they would choose the target that allowed them to see that picture even if they got much less juice than the other target gave them. other pictures, like the faces of low status monkeys, were not valuable to the monkeys, but they would look at the pictures if the picture was accompanied by significantly more juice than the target that didn't make them look at a picture.

this research is not at all like my research, but it's interesting anyway.