Quilted Science

Does anyone remember the wildly inappropriate Uncle Ben's Rice commercials of a few years ago? A woman would put a bowl of rice in her microwave, then squirm around like it was giving her an orgasm to eat it, then BOOM! Uncle Ben's FACE grinning right at you!

It was so vile I actually stopped watching TV for a while to avoid it.

I would be cautious using data from experiments as a matter of routine. In my experience much of the social research, studies, surveys, etc... are not very reliable. And unless we really dig into the details we can't really tell when the data is valid and when it is not.

Just out of curiosity, what about going a bit lower into the actual chemical reactions in the brain. I'm not much of a biologist or whatever but I've read that both men and women create dopamine when they see scantily clad women. Since we can't just get off sexually whenever we want, we need to do something else as reaction to the increased reward chemicals. That's where the actual object for sale comes in. We hit up the store and see the object. Our mind thinks of the commercial and the thought of the scantily clad woman produces the dopamine which then makes us stop logical thought and make that impulse buy.