"I look better when tanned"

Skin cancer may be the fastest growing type of cancer in the U.S., but some people -- especially young women -- insist that they can't get enough of a tan.  It just makes 'em feel better and more attractive, or at least that's the motivation.

Turns out, according to this study (accessed from campus, your mileage may vary), that it may be unfortunately true. An experiment shows men found darker tanned women to be more physically attractive, thinner, and healthier than they did light and medium tanned women. The study was published in the American Journal of Health Behavior (2008, Volume 32, p. 243-252).

The conclusion?

Campaigns and other interventions targeted at males need to reduce the perceptions that tanned females are healthier, thinner, and more attractive.  Educational efforts targeting females need to reduce attraction-based motivations and to address the need to keep themselves healthy and to not tailor their behaviors to attract males.

In a perfect world, perhaps.  Hopefully someone will come up with a good health campaign to accomplish this, but I have my doubts.  I suspect it'll require some pop culture thing to happen -- a movie, a celebrity, some awful incident.  I suppose a "pale girls are sexy" campaign might work, but it'd have to be done in a clever way.

How to Improve Political Knowledge

So I'm reading this study for my graduate seminar -- this week, health comm -- and the study tries to explain through evolutionary psychology why people use tanning beds or tan excessively even when they know it's bad for 'em.

The reason? A tan is an "aesthetic cue" for "the mating game."

The authors argue that it's not what you know that matters, at least for behaviors like tanning or reckless driving, it's how we've evolved to perceive certain behaviors. If they're tied to mating, we'll do them regardless. Young males see reckless driving as "sexual signaling."

Okay, yeah, fun and all that, but what's it got to do with political knowledge?

We gotta make political knowledge sexy, or at least find a way to integrate mating into what people know about politics and public affairs. Maybe no one can mate unless they pass a 10-item political knowledge test? Okay, that's not gonna happen, and to be honest I see no evolutionary advantage to being able to name your congressional representative or knowing which branch of government is charged with interpreting the constitution, so I guess this idea is a wash.

In other words, being a policy wonk ain't gonna get ya any action.