Readers prove that men like sexual variety about:reader?url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3344900/Readers-pr...

telegraph.co.uk

Readers prove that men like sexual

variety
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
3 minutes

Support for the common view that men like more novelty in their
love life than women, what biologists call the "Coolidge effect", has
emerged from tests on readers of this newspaper.

Evidence that men are likelier to be "love rats" has come from an
internet experiment on www.alittlelab.com on more than 700 Daily
Telegraph readers in the run-up to Valentine's Day by a team at the
University of Liverpool.

The roving male eye is typical of the Coolidge effect, which is

named after President Calvin Coolidge and refers to an apocryphal
incident when the American president and his wife were taken on
separate tours around a government farm.

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Mrs Coolidge asked whether the lone rooster was sufficient for the
many hens. When told that the bird performed dozens of times ever
day, she remarked: "Be sure to tell that to the President." After
being puzzled initially, President asked if the cock always remained
with the same hen. When told that it was a different hen each time,
he remarked: "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

At Liverpool, Dr Tony Little wanted to investigate whether the

Coolidge effect is real. Earlier experiments had suggested that
people are more drawn to familiar faces and he wondered if this
was more true for women.

Telegraph readers were asked to judge a series of computer-

generated faces based on celebrity faces such as Angelina Jolie,
Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney,
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

They were presented last week with exaggerated versions and

"anti" versions of the same faces, where the images were more
typical of particular features of a celebrity, or less typical,
possessing the opposite set of features.

The experiment shows that women preferred the exaggerated

familiar faces. But men, while preferring familiar male faces, tended
to prefer novel female ones. "There is a significant difference

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between male and female preferences for the female faces," said
Dr Little. "The Coolidge effect has been demonstrated before in
other mammals, for example rats, but a preference for novelty in
males also appears to be true in humans - everyone likes familiar
faces generally but males like a bit of novelty. To my knowledge,
this is the first time this has been tested in people."

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