Posted on 04/14/2012 8:11:05 PM PDT by lbryce
Hey guys, want to look taller? Just pick up a handgun. Because a study finds that men are more often perceived to be big and strong when they hold a gun. The report is in the journal Public Library of Science ONE.
More than 600 subjects looked at photographs of the right hands of four different white males, each holding a different object: A power drill, a handsaw, a caulking gun and a .45 caliber handgun.
They then viewed silhouetted images of six men who varied in height and musculature and were asked to choose which man most closely matched each hand in the photos.
The participants consistently matched the gun toting hand with the taller and stronger male images. The hand holding the caulking gun was matched most often with the smallest and weakest male images.
In a second study the hands held a paintbrush, squirt gun and a kitchen knife. And again male hands holding the most dangerous object, the knife, were judged to go with the largest and strongest physiques. Seems like strength and power is in the eye of the beholder. Who is strongly swayed by weapons.
Christie Nicholson
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Psychology experiments are all run by god-damned idiots. The fact that the other tools all created varying results should prove the invalidity of the experiment. What’s likely happening is that people are using the fixed-size object to estimate the size of the person holding the object. The handgun is probably smaller than people expect, because they’re used to monster-sized guns in movies. The caulk gun is probably larger than they expect. The researchers should test whether larger guns made the men wielding the guns be perceived as still larger (more manlier gun, perhaps confirming their hypthesis), or smaller (due to smaller size in relation to the gun).
[The APA needs to rename 'Napoleon Complex', to 'Bloomberg Complex']
Sounds like a very good scientific study to me. Colt firearms used to advertise:
God made men and Samuel Colt made them equal.
It’s a common perception that a gun is an ‘equalizer’.
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