Undressed for Success? The Effects of Half-Naked Women on Economic Behavior

Bonnier, Evelina and Dreber, Anna and Hederos Eriksson, Karin and Sandberg, Anna, Undressed for Success? The Effects of Half-Naked Women on Economic Behavior (May 15, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3168626

Abstract: Images of half-naked women are in many societies ubiquitous in advertising and popular culture. Yet relatively little is known about the potential impacts of such images on economic decision making. In this paper, we examine how exposure to images of half-naked women affect risk taking, willingness to compete and math performance. We perform a lab experiment with a total of 648 participants of both genders, randomly exposing participants to advertising images including either women in bikini or underwear, fully dressed women, or no women. Exposure to images of half-naked women could potentially have effects on economic preferences and performance through channels such as arousal, cognitive load and stereotyping. Following a pre-registered pre-analysis plan, we find no treatment effects on any of the outcome measures for female participants. For male participants, we also find no effect on willingness to compete or math performance, but our results indicate that men take more risk after having been exposed to images of half-naked women compared to images including no women. We thus do not find any strong support for the hypothesis that exposure to images of half-naked women impact economic preferences, but given the indications of an effect on men's risk taking future studies should explore this further.

Keywords: economic decision making, risk preferences, willingness to compete, altruism, experiment
JEL Classification: D03, C91