To delve into this intriguing topic, the researchers conducted an online survey with 328 initial participants, eventually narrowed down to 44 heterosexual male guitarists who were fans of metal music. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 47 years, with the majority being from the United States and Poland. The majority were single, had a bachelor’s degree, and identified themselves as middle-class – a demographic representation typical of the two most represented countries.
No, no, all it tells you “single white middle class dudes who have too much time to spare for online surveys and consider themselves to be epic guitar players are also X”.
Now, I’d say X and them thinking they’re an epic metal guitar player are both symptoms of something else. And so is their interest in weird online studies.
“Controlling” for cofonding factors on this sample is ridiculous, and doesn’t add any external validity to your study.
TL;DR: weirdos online are weird, but in this example we only picked weirdos who think they’re good at playing guitar. Great study!
P.S. it looks like you can publish any BS you want in psychology, and then write a long article where you pretend to be a scientist and you were always interested in “evolutionary effects of music on mating success”.
You know what, this researcher is just another weirdo, but payed for exercising his twisted fantasies.
AI image is fucked up. 27 tuner keys on the headstock? Uh, no. And what the fuck, 12 knobs? Mini-humbuckers? The fuck? And the guy must be really little? Fuck this.
Read the actual paper. Psypost is a shit source. The headline is clickbait and the direction the article goes isn’t the direction the study went. As usual, Psypost is really interested in saying things they want to say not thing the study was covering.
Yeah, my take away from just reading the abstract is that the study doesn’t really conclude anything significant. One of the reasons is that they weren’t able to get a diverse sample, only W.E.I.R.D dudes.
What I think should the headline is not about how well they get laid, it’s that metal players don’t do it to get laid.
The researchers found a positive correlation between the time spent playing guitar chords and the desire facet of the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory Revised. This suggests that guitarists who devote more time to playing chords are more motivated towards casual sex. However, when the researchers conducted a multiple regression analysis to see if guitar-practicing habits could predict the number of lifetime sexual partners, the overall model did not show a significant result.
So guitarists spend lots of time practicing to attract women, but it doesn’t actually work. They could probably find similar results with gym rats.
Or the online survey is shit. Or there’s an insane sample bias. Or, those are actually devoted guitar players and since they have a fulfilling hobby occupying most of their life, they’re more motivated to have casual sex as they don’t require a mating partner to also fullfil them. Who the heck knows.
But my bet is on “the sample is shit, and you can’t trust psychologists with not cheating on their regressions anyway”. I bet they ran 100 online studies and picked the one where they found some effect on one of the 100 regressions they ran.
Now, since we published, let’s write an article filled with bogus sexist theories completely unrelated to the study. And make it sound like they are a direct conclusion from the paper.
Ladies and gentlemen, state of the psychological research.
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