O is For Ovulating AND Obama

121017085524-obama-romney-2nd-debate-getty-cnni-story-topCNN profiles amazing study on women's voting patterns

The researchers found that during the fertile time of the month, when levels of the hormone estrogen are high, single women appeared more likely to vote for Obama and committed women appeared more likely to vote for Romney, by a margin of at least 20%, Durante said. This seems to be the driver behind the researchers' overall observation that single women were inclined toward Obama and committed women leaned toward Romney.

5 thoughts on “O is For Ovulating AND Obama

  1. “Here’s how Durante explains this: When women are ovulating, they “feel sexier,” and therefore lean more toward liberal attitudes on abortion and marriage equality. Married women have the same hormones firing, but tend to take the opposite viewpoint on these issues, she says.”
    Yeah, that would be the classic failing of psychobabble evolutionary psych, when opposite behaviors can be equally well explained by the theory, by just putting in an oh so convenient fudge factor. That’s the substantive problem with most evolutionary psych (though not absolutely all of it — the authors find a way to justify the behavior, correlation, or data with the theory they start out with.
    There are ways to justify the polarity switch in the hormonal correlation with voting trends (assuming, of course, that it’s statistically valid to start with). But, the methodology and analysis required to do so be pretty hard.

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  2. Not really forthcoming in Psych Science? (If CNN doesn’t report on work that is unpublished). Interesting that it was pulled. Now, the comments thread is accusing CNN of being unwilling to publish unpopular science. I’m guessing that some standard was violated (for example, publication standards, or that the article was ghost written by an involved party, or that it relied on a press release of some sort too much).

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