Lust Is a Many-Splendored Thing

With fancy new financial instruments exploding as regularly as fireworks on the Fourth of July, more than a few people — including congressmen and burned investors — are left to wonder, What was Wall Street thinking when it so casually shouldered all that risk?

Some brain researchers at Stanford and Northwestern may have an answer: Sex.

Young heterosexual men were much more likely to make a bigger financial gamble when shown erotic pictures, compared with when they were shown a picture of something scary, like a snake, or something neutral, like a stapler, the Associated Press reported.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, researchers found that arousing photographs stimulated the same part of the brain — the V-shaped nucleus accumbens — that reacts when people take financial risks. Their research was published in the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

The hub is associated with feelings of pleasure, and when it was activated by erotic images, the men were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime.

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, said sex isn't the only stimulus. Anything that gives pleasure — eating chocolate or holding a winning lottery ticket — could have a similar effect. But whatever the stimulus, the experiment demonstrates the power that emotions and arousal have over financial decisions.

(Tip of the hat to Ryan Schick and Tyler Cowen.)

by Mark Stein