inverse correlation between belching after meals and asking after womenfolk

Factual Questions
1

In the book Games People Play, there’s the following

[quote]
(http://quotequarry.com/quotes.php?id=614):

Could anyone explain why there is this inverse correlation?

2

bump

3

WAG: Maybe a machismo versus effeminacy thing? While sometimes both of these traits can be brought together into one (see samurai), generally they’re separate.

4

I soooooooo want to see a cite for Dr. Berne’s observational data on which he based that conclusion.

5

This looks to me like the sort of thing that one finds when data-mining large amounts of information, but which don’t really mean anything. Remember, if you’re looking at 20 different completely random pairs of data sets, you’d expect about one of them to show a correlation significant at the 95% confidence interval.

6

Does “asking after another man’s wife” mean what I think it does?

I can see how the relationship would be ironic. You’d expect the kind of brutes who go wifeswapping to also grunt and belch. But maybe it’s the other way around. The brutes are possessive of their women, but the enlightened hippies have manners and also share.

Or maybe it’s all bs. Btw, what communities are these? What else separates them? Are they like, “this side of the settlement wife-swaps, this side doesn’t,” or are there larger geographic, economic, and cultural distinctions?

7

Probably not. “Asking after __” usually means asking someone how another person not present is.

8

Oh. So what would then be interesting about the whole observation?