Sniffing women’s tears reduces male aggression by 44%, study finds

This could get real dark

Reminds me of the fact that female ducks have really complex vaginas to try to avoid getting raped (and it doesn't work).
- It doesn’t prevent the rape, but they do have “cul-de-sac pouches en route, that could prevent fertilisation by capturing unwelcome sperm.” So they can choose whether or not they get fertilized. Which is at least some sort of a defense. Edit: link for quote
- Male ducks have corkscrew penises, and female ducks have corkscrew vaginas that go the opposite direction.
- Ducks are involved in a genital arm’s race with each other, just because of how much raping they do.

Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution

Why would they not include male tears in the test?

Because dad says boys don’t cry.
- Is your dad Robert Smith?
- Not true; beta men cry all the time.
If male tears were the only control, then they run the risk of not finding any result. If you have 3 groups, you need a substantially larger sample size because you are running a less powerful statistical test.
Easier to start with the test that's most likely to work, and narrow it down from there if you succeed
- Having men sniff three different samples would still allow for saline as a control and wouldn't really make the data set that much more complicated.
They said they had a hard time finding men who would cry.
They also didn't test women sniffing women's tears, or men sniffing men or women sniffing men, or animal tears.
They left a lot of variables out of this one.
Too hard to source
Seems there was a study that concluded female tears raise testosterone of men. I thus think it's kinda understandable they did it in this way. But, yeah, not really convincing.
I feel like they should also have experimental groups of children and the elderly, to see whether age also has an effect on hormonal responses.
I suppose that applies both in regards to tears from and how tears affect. Hmm, I can see this getting rather complicated and extensive.
- I feel like they should also have experimental groups of children and the elderly
  I find this is my answer to most things honestly.
Because they sought to justify male aggression toward a non-subservient target.

As the wise man Borat once said:

"Do not fear me gypsy, all I want from you is your tears. Please give them to me or I will take them."

What am I supposed to do with this information

Uh, bottle the tears of women and throw them (the tears, not the women) on your male enemies?
- Throwing women would also work, blunt force trauma does not discriminate, it only mushes
- thanks for specifying, was about to make a horrible mistake
Start fucking dropping tears en masse in chem trails across the country, maybe that'll help. They already think we do it anyway.
Sniff?
Be more like Eric Cartman.
Distract yourself from your problems like everyone else? /s
Make women cry, bottle it, convert to crystalline form, snort.
Go sniff their snatch instead, it has the opposite effect.

Must be why they prefer to make us suffer from a distance, sitting safely in Congress and the courts where they won't be exposed to our tears

Can we do something to induce tears from women without causing any serious harm? Like tickling your feet with a feather duster or something? It just seems like the perfect thing to pour on Trump's head.
- There are entire websites for precisely that. I've heard.
- Hallmark channel movies.
- Psylocibin
- Onions
- If you leave the toilet seat up and forget to take out the trash, at a particular time of the month, that’s often enough.
  If that fails, you’ll have to say her favourite top is starting to look a bit snug.

This is a fucking crazy statistic. What the shit.

Now, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have conducted a series of experiments to investigate whether, like in rodents, sniffing human female tears reduces aggression in men and what functional effect it has on their brains.
“We knew that sniffing tears lowers testosterone and that lowering testosterone has a greater effect on aggression in men than in women, so we began by studying the impact of tears on men because this gave us higher chances of seeing an effect,” said Shani Agron, the lead and co-corresponding author of the study.
There’s limited evidence of human tear chemosignaling, but a previous study by some of the researchers involved in the current study found that women’s tears contain an odorless chemical signal that, when sniffed by males, reduced self-rated sexual arousal, physiological measures of arousal, and testosterone levels.
First, the researchers tested whether sniffing female tears reduced aggression in men. ‘Emotional’ tears were collected from six human donors aged 22 to 25 who watched sad film clips in isolation to induce crying. Twenty-five men were asked to play a two-person monetary game with an opponent they were told was human but was, in fact, a computer algorithm. The game was designed to elicit an aggressive response by the male toward their opponent, whom they were led to believe was cheating. When given the opportunity, the male could get revenge on their opponent by causing them to lose money with no personal gain to them.
Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution – both are odorless – but were not told what they were sniffing. The researchers observed a 43.7% reduction in aggression following exposure to tears. To evaluate the robustness of their results, they ran a bootstrap analysis, a statistical procedure that resamples a single data set to create many simulated samples. The analysis found that the probability of obtaining this outcome by chance was 2.9%, suggesting that, like in rodents, chemosignals in human emotional tears have a primary aggression-blocking function.
- I have this thing where I tend to get a raging hard-on when a woman is crying near me, like if a my girlfriend is sad and I'm consoling her:: boijg.
  I have no intellectual inte=st a woman crying, and generally don't feel "turned on", like, I'll generally just try and }pretend like it's not happening and have no urge to do anything about it. I've always kind of wondered "what the fuck" every time it happens since there's nothing I find remotely interesting sexually about it. Now though, I wonder.
Welcome to being an animal!
There's some crazy shit about our biology that affects how we think and act.

The journal isn't such a high prestige journal. It's actually a new one with open access, which doesn't attract best studies. Combined with the fact it's a psychological study, which is hard to replicate, and somehow the authors employed MRI, which doesn't really prove anything by itself, I think the authors knew it wouldn't be perceived as the best quality article.

Your first statement is completely wrong.
PLOS Biology, the journal this article is published in, is founded in 2003, so hardly a new journal, and has an impact factor of ~9, which means that it IS a prestigious journal.
- I'm sure biology publications started 20 years ago. /s
  The impact factor is rather high, I agree, but IF also a statistic that's often criticized for unreliability.
  I'd take it back if someone in biology tells me their community submit their work there, but otherwise I'd be skeptical. It's also weird for a 20 year old journal to accept everything biology. Good new journals tend to specialize.
"Hey man, I fucked yo wiiiiifeee". "Quickly! smell my finger, how do you feel?"
FWIW, it's also not a new idea. I remember reading something similar years ago, except it was about sexual aggression.
What about this particular paper is difficult to replicate?

Sometimes I wonder how much I am really in control and how much it is biochemical weapons by living things around me.

You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want.
- Is this compatibilism?
Similar biochemicals are flooding your internal systems all the time.

How... uhh... yea like how did someone even come up with this as a thing to uhhh... study? How the shit did someone's brain arrive at "let's get women's tears and uhhh present them to aggressive men." Like... what?

The only difference between a scientific experiment and screwing around is writing it down.
Someone observed something odd in the wild and decided to investigate further and stumbled upon this effect. Largely similar to most other discoveries?

Ok, liberal women of America. Here's your chance. Cry those liberal tears they all want you to cry and then throw the tear jars in their faces!

Chemical warfare at its finest.
Once again, Always Sunny is ahead of the curve
- Sunny made an episode about this? Im not entirely done with the series but I'm on season 14

It usually makes me horny, but yeah, I guess you could say that’s not aggressive.

Bloodhound Gang had it right; the lap dance really is better when the stripper's crying!

It just gets me hard, not a good combo.

Which, as always, leads back to aggression.

sniffing the tears of men just makes us more powerful

I could imagine, yes, that 44% of aggressive men would stop dead in their tracks if shouted "SMELL MY TEARS! SNIFF'EM, GEORGE!" mid fight

I have a business idea

How does one even begin to have a hypothesis to even decide to test this? Why does one? Any answer feels like it would be morally questionable or involve a fetish of some kind.

Well not to get dark. But if theres a domestic issue and man is abusing a woman to the point she is crying... And then the man calms down once she starts crying... Or maybe there's a really stressful situation and both partners are frustrated and the woman crys and the man some how bucks up - Maybe - I dunno. Weirder shit has been done. I'm not trying to say woman weak and do a cry. I dunno I'm not a tear doctor
- I'm just not buying the whole thing given the percentage of abusive husbands who kill their wives. (Not arguing with you in particular)
As for why, imagine if they could isolate the compound that reduces aggression. It could be really useful for de-escalating violent situations.
- Just dust every major populated area with that every day.
Literally my first thought after reading the title. Like, I'm sure there's a legit reason to have pursued testing this but it sure feels a little too on-the-nose.
- Like, it would be one thing if they were doing a more general test on tears of a variety of people and their impact on others and then found this potential impact that led them to do a more specific study resulting in this. But to zero in specifically on adult woman tears without any known prior reason for it feels...odd.