Self-study
`When a young man masturbates, exactly how distracted does he get? An experiment performed on students at the University of California, Berkeley aimed to find out. [..]
Having established that the topic is of value, Ariely and Loewenstein get right to the action. They explain how they recruited 35 students, offering to pay each a small fee for the effort of masturbating while answering a survey. Each student was given a laptop computer with a keypad “designed to be operated easily using only the non-dominant hand.”
Some of the volunteers had instructions to answer the questions “while in their natural, presumably not highly aroused, state”. Others “were first asked to self-stimulate themselves, and were presented with the same questions only after they had achieved a high but sub-orgasmic level of arousal.”‘