Do men like smart women? Well, science has finally confirmed what we all suspected for a long time: men find smart women terrifying. Oh wait, there’s more! Science has also discovered that when a woman does something better than a man, her feelings of masculinity decrease.
A study called «Distance (psychological) makes love grow» found that while men they like the idea dating a smart woman when it comes to reality, they are not interested. And when a woman is better than them at a task, they feel «less manly.»
Related news
In the study’s preliminary survey, 86 percent of men they said that they would feel comfortable dating someone smarter than them. In the series of experiments that followed, the researchers tested the validity of those claims.
In the first version of the study, 105 male undergraduate participants read a hypothetical scenario about a woman who did better than them on a test, and then the participants were asked to rate how romantically desirable the woman seemed.
In the second version, the researchers asked 151 college students to take an intelligence test and then asked them if they were interested in meeting the woman down the hall, who had scored higher or lower than them on the proof.
Both studies found that when men imagined a hypothetical woman that he was smarter than them or only knew the woman in an abstract senseThey were interested in meeting her or possibly dating her. Apparently a smart woman is great in theory but not in practice.
In the next two versions of the study, male participants came into contact with a woman (who was associated with the study) who had done better or worse on an IQ test than they had.
After the participants met the woman, took the test while sitting next to her, and heard their scores read aloud, the male participants were instructed to move their chairs in front of the woman.
Participants were then asked to answer a survey about their first impressions of each other, specifically how attractive and desirable they were to each other.
The researchers were interested in the actual physical distance between the two chairs as the true measure of how attracted the man was to the woman.
Not surprisingly, men who associated with a woman who scored higher on the intelligence test felt the need to physically distance themselves from her by moving their chairs.
They also tended to rate women as less attractive that men who interacted with a woman who scored worse than them.
The last two versions of the study (six in all) found that men were less interested in dating and interacting with a more intelligent woman when face-to-face with them.
However, in the fifth study, when he was psychologically distant (supposedly in the next room), there was no difference in men’s inclination to date or interact with herno matter how well you did on the test compared to them.
In fact, the men who never saw the woman showed a slight tendency to wanting to interact with a woman who was supposedly more intelligent.
The findings were summarized this way: «[Los] six studies revealed that when evaluating psychologically distant targets, men showed greater attraction to women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.
In contrast, when targets were psychologically close, men showed less attraction to women who teased them.»
So do men like smart women? Scientifically speaking, no, and that’s pretty sad.