I’m sticking this in GQ, but if this belongs in IMHO - my apologies to the Moderator. Flipped a mental coin, came up GQ. That said…
I was just browsing through my campus bookstore, and I saw a copy of “The Art Of Seduction”, a book which claims to offer comprehensive and effective advice on seducing members of either gender. My question is: Is there any way in which it would be possible to test the assertions in this text, or any other “how to get laid” book, in a scientific manner? I’m not asking so much about the procedure itself - it’s easy to come up with something like “recruit 100-200 male subjects, take their photographs, have one group of women rank on attractiveness, then have these men attempt to pick up women at bars/clubs a, b, c, d over a certain period of time, varying techniques suggested in the text with other strategems.”
The only problem, of course, is that such an experiment would most likely be regarded as highly unethical. What we’d be talking about here is either recruiting unwitting research subjects for the purpose of sex, or manipulating people into having sex for the purposes of scientific research, depending on how you look at it. Not the sort of thing an ethics committee would condone.
But is there some other way that the assertions in a text like “The Art of Seduction” could be tested scientifically AND ethically? It annoys me when authors think they can just make sufficiently bold statements and pass themselves off as some sort of experts - I like my pick-up tips to be peer-reviewed, thank you kindly.
Thoughts?