“Big Men” in leadership roles [new study]

How does body weight and size affect the perceived persuasiveness of ‘leaders’ (when the ‘leader’ is a man) ? This question has recently been examined by three professors from the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, US. Professor Kevin Kniffin and Professor Vicki  Bogan, along with faculty colleague Professor David Just (also now at […]

Fancy Upgrade Car Wheels and their Evolutionary Significance (study)

“Charles Darwin considered costly traits that could not be accounted for by survival advantage, such as peacock tails, problematic to his theory of evolution by natural selection. He later realized that these features conferred reproductive advantage in the acquisition of mating partners.” Could this peacock tail insight be applied to humans? Specifically male humans? More […]

Computerised gender classification (part 1: eyebrows)

Can you tell a person’s gender from just a glimpse of their eyebrows? Could a computerised system do the same? To find out, a project was undertaken by Yujie Dong (of the Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University) and Damon L. Woodard (now at the Biometrics and Pattern Recognition Lab, University of […]

Upside-down male/female swimwear/underwear picture recognition differences

Are there differences in the rapid-recognition (viz. 250 ms) of photos of men and women in swimsuits (or underwear) when they are presented upside-down? A 2011 paper in the prestige journal Psychological Science suggests the answer maybe yes. Inspired (in part) by a 1969 study from Dr. Robert K. Yin, which was entitled ‘Looking at […]

Further progress in male nipple positioning

Since 2009, progress has been made in devising techniques for determining ideal male nipple positions. (see previous Improbable item on Divine Proportions in male nipple re-positioning) A research team from the department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, have now contributed to the body of work – noting […]

Male-Body-Part-Metaphors-driven Organizational Change

If, from a critical and/or strategic management perspective, you’ve examined the metaphorical resources provided by specific parts of the male body for thinking [about] masculinity in social and organizational contexts, then, like many others, you may well have concentrated on the phallus. Now, a new paper in the journal Human Relations (March 5, 2015) points […]

Mancaves and masculinity

Man Caves. Are they retrograde expressions of masculine ethos, or therapeutic, integrative spaces? Either way, perhaps they haven’t received the academic attention they deserve? Until now. The Journal of Consumer Culture presents work by Professor Risto Moisio (California State University, Long Beach, USA) and Professor Mariam Beruchashvili (California State University, Northridge, USA) who have authored […]