September 09, 2005
Why women like cats (and why Euros are weird)?
From the Guardian:
There are fewer experiments in humans, but results from studies of students and conscript soldiers in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s highlighted the fact that infected people showed different personality traits to non-infected people - and that the differences depended on sex. Infected men were more likely to be aggressive, jealous and suspicious, while women became more outgoing and showed signs of higher intelligence.
From TimesOnline:
He found the women infected with toxoplasma spent more money on clothes and were consistently rated as more attractive. “We found they were more easy-going, more warm-hearted, had more friends and cared more about how they looked,” he said. “However, they were also less trustworthy and had more relationships with men.”By contrast, the infected men appeared to suffer from the “alley cat” effect: becoming less well groomed undesirable loners who were more willing to fight. They were more likely to be suspicious and jealous. “They tended to dislike following rules,” Flegr said.
Ann Althouse comments:
So a disease carried by cats makes you act like a cat? That seems awfully bizarre, yet it's hard to shake off the significance of a brain-altering parasite that half of us have -- and 80-90% of French and Germans have!
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