[ErrantX]

Agreed. Actually the question does still hold interest IMO because it forces her to acknowledge to herself that she may have a price.

You say:

In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price.

And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made.

I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of [volunteer] fellow students (both male and female) with interesting results. I pitched the question exactly as outlined here (a girlfriend asked the male members). The aim was to force this self-realisation of their "price" and subsequently we "bartered" for the real price they would accept.

I realised a couple of things; firstly in realistic terms 1 million pounds is generally a lot lower than the "realistic price". When I followed up with the question "would you really sleep with me for a million" the answer was usually "no". The reason the girl says "maybe" in the initial instance is because she doesn't believe that I have a million pounds to offer.

When I substituted £100,000 for a million the response rate tipped much harder towards "unlikely". To further test this theory I asked one of my more well of friends (who looked stereotypically rich) to conduct a similar survey - but this time to show them a cheque made of for £1 Million at the same time. Again the responses tended towards "unlikely" (and there was, actually, a larger amount of disgust at the idea).

Once I got past this stage we bartered on what the "price" might be; invariably money was quickly removed from the table. Favours were preferred; for example attending as a date to a wedding was one price. When I forced conversations back to money the price went a lot higher. £10 Million was the minimum (this is possibly because 1 Million is not considered so much any more, I don't know). My well off friend had even more dramatic rises; one girl requested £5 Million a year for the next three years.

More sex was generally offered in return for more complex rewards; for example in the above example (£5,000,0000/yr for 3 yrs) it was hashed out that a number of sexual encounters and "weekend breaks" were on the cards.

For the men things were a lot simpler; they balked at any ides of being paid full stop. Almost to the man they refused payment and offered to sleep with the girl anyway. Out of interest I got a much plainer girl to ask the same question; there was still a general refusal to take money (although one or two "accepted" £100, preferring it to 1 Million) but also several outright refusals. With the plainer girl men offered to sleep with her (for no money), for my more attractive friend they offered to sleep with her and take her out to dinner.

In fact dinner featured a lot in negotiations; there was actually a general aversion amongst the men (particularly, for some interesting reason, among the "jock" types) to simply having sex, a big majority preferred to offer a more complete "package". I have a partial theory that some were sidestepping the issue of money by proposing that the girl paid for dinner (or whatever date was agreed).

This was conducted on a group of about 100 people I randomly grabbed outside our student union over a couple of afternoons :) there isn't a lot of structure to what we did, we just followed our noses. But I think there was some interesting stuff we discovered.

[dkarl]

Actually the question does still hold interest IMO because it forces her to acknowledge to herself that she may have a price.

This is ridiculous. The question does make her uncomfortable, but not because of the question itself. She knows she'll sleep with a guy for a million dollars. She's thought about it. She may have even thought about her "price" for letting a man fuck her. The problem is she knows the limits on what she's supposed to say and how she's supposed to present herself, and here's this clueless jerk trying to force her beyond them. She's playing the game, navigating social rules, and he isn't even acknowledging the tight spot he's put her in. In fact, he's simultaneously relishing her discomfort and resenting her for feeling that way. What does she do? To get through the situation as easily and harmlessly as possible, she either denies the legitimacy of the argument or names absurdly large amounts of money.

To really get a woman's price, she'd have to be assured of discretion. And her price would, ultimately, be affected by her confidence in the assurances of discretion offered. Her price for prostituting herself openly would be much higher, though not as high as the price she's willing to admit to in the original joke or the experiment you describe. After all, in the experiment, she pays the price of advertising her willingness to have sex for money without actually getting the money. A million pounds buys a lot of honesty -- what were you offering? Even with the check, you haven't established a credible offer. The woman would have a lot of doubts that would be difficult to overcome. Is it a scam? Why me? Does this guy want to hurt me or humiliate me? Is this a mean-spirited prank organized by one of my exes? From her point of view, it's vanishingly unlikely to be a genuine offer. She's thinking, "If I even give this guy a chance to prove his bona fides, I'll probably be putting myself at risk." After all, even if he actually has a million pounds in his checking account, he's still more likely to be a killer than a guy who pays a million pounds for sex. Just sayin'. She's not stupid. And if the guy is serious, the onus is on him to prove that he understands her reservations and to think of some way to reassure her. Her initial response shouldn't deter him.

Anyway, to depart from your experiment and get back to the conversation in the joke as it's usually told -- no longer talking about your experiment -- it's a typical conversation for socially incompetent young geeks who are frustrated by all the social taboos, who suspect (partly correctly) that everyone around them is screwing like rabbits, and who are so painfully frustrated about not being able to talk about it that they make fools of themselves beating their heads against the wall of taboo with rational arguments instead doing something that might actually clear the way to frank conversation, such as cultivating trust and intimacy. (Gosh, I just might be speaking from experience here.)

So the whole thing resolves to a guy making a girl uncomfortable and taking her refusal to be outré for stupidity. That's pretty dickish. Especially when the point is to make yourself look smart in comparison. I have NO idea why Feynman liked this joke, except that maybe he used it as a racy line-crossing move when chatting up women, in which case the logic itself is kind of beside the point. I supposed he knew the right moment to push it. Or maybe he just knew his audience. But that would make him a bit of a misogynist, since he would know -- admit it -- that the chief delight of this story for most people is not whipping it out Feynman-style at just the right moment when a woman is ready to let down her barriers. The chief appeal for most is getting the last laugh on a woman who wouldn't let you past her facade of propriety. Why would he stoop to that kind of pandering?

Anyway, the original word game breaks down if you examine it just a little. If I'd bake a loaf of bread for a million dollars, am I a baker?

If I'd do your taxes for a million dollars, am I a tax accountant?

If I'd write a book for a million dollars, am I a writer?

If I'd change your oil for a million dollars, am I an auto mechanic?

If I'd teach a yoga class for a million dollars, am I a yoga instructor?

So is she a prostitute? Clearly not. Is she a whore? Well, yeah, quite often she is, in the sense that the word "whore" in any language usually means a woman whose sexual activity makes the speaker feel bad in some way.

But don't worry about this line of reasoning, or any other, being used against you when you whip this gem out at a party, because the response will divide between a couple of straight-up misogynists enthusiastically backing you up and a majority who just distance themselves from you, possibly by scoring points off you in some irrational way that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the point you're trying to make, because people are STUPID and more interested in playing STUPID SOCIAL GAMES than actually THINKING. So your point is unchallenged! Unrefuted! Whoohoo! (Sarcasm aimed at the original joke and at my teenage self, not personally at you.)

[ErrantX]

She knows she'll sleep with a guy for a million dollars. She's thought about it.

A reasonable point; except you've asserted that and I'm not sure it's true. Do you have any data to back up the theory? Because one of the things that became clear to me was people hadn't really and truly considered it; there was a lot of thinking going on.

I realise the experiment was flawed; and we tested too few people to really make any definite observations.

However the aim was not to present it as a serious offer; but as a thought exercise. Once over the "wtf is this guy asking me" moment at the start we spent quite a while with each person (in private) discussing his/her thoughts. This made it a little more solid.

I agree with the idea that the joke is idiotic; clearly it is just misogynist crap (or, very occasionally just a racy joke - I've pulled it out maybe once to rescue a date :)).

[dkarl]

It doesn't matter how many people you test, because you can't establish a credible offer of that much money. Can you describe a situation that you could actually set up in which a woman would think she was more likely to get a million pounds than to get dragged into a basement, tortured, raped, and murdered? Of course both of those scenarios would be far outside chances compared to the chances that somebody was just trying to play a humiliating joke on her or steal her identity.

The question a woman's brain is really engaged with in these scenarios is, "What's the safest way to deal with this situation?" That applies even if she actually knows you and is a modern liberal woman, because she's got to walk a line between seeming prudish or dishonest and triggering the insecurity thats lurk in every male breast.

[Edit: sorry for all the unacknowledged edits; since HN has no "preview" button I just post and edit.]

[ErrantX]

because you can't establish a credible offer of that much money

Of course you can; that is pretty easy to do. (also you might note we tried a lot more credible monetary amounts as well).

Can you describe a situation that you could actually set up in which a woman would think she was more likely to get a million pounds than to get dragged into a basement, tortured, raped, and murdered?

This is something of a strawman... because clearly it all depends on the individual and how they perceive a situation. But it seems reasonable to suppose you can ask the person (as I did) to visualise a situation where they were receiving a serious offer (a lot of phsyc testing uses this premise).

"What's the safest way to deal with this situation?"

When I said bartering I should point out it wasn't actively bartering over the idea of sex; it was a discussion about the ideas and this concept of a "price". Or in opther words it was explained what the point was. Most said it was an interesting thought experiment.

So where your seeing this as the individuals thinking "oh crap, this crazy person is saying really weird/scary things" that was not the situation. We used the opening line as a gambit to provoke this idea of a "price".

I'm actually most interested in your currently undefended assertion that people have thought about their "price". It's the most interesting part of this for me.

EDIT: it's worth pointing out this is less about establishing what cash amount people want for having sex with you than about getting people to discuss a social idea that is almost certainly frowned upon, but which could make them rich via minimum effort/skill. We could have tried something like.. would you kill for £1 Million - but there were strong reasons against that (sex itself is not frowned on (just paid-for), where murder is. Sex is more interesting because there is a divide between how men and women react to it).

[dkarl]

If you say that the whole point was to provoke people to think, and not to glean any information about what they would actually do, I'm fine with that. However, I'm skeptical that women would devote much thought to the imaginary situation that will never happen when they were in a real situation where they were being asked to discuss their sexuality. It's kind of like you've never seen or heard a goat before, so you walk up to someone with your pet tiger on a leash and ask them to do an impression of a goat. You're going to get an impression calculated not to excite the tiger, without much thought to what a goat looks and sounds like.

I'm actually most interested in your currently undefended assertion that people have thought about their "price". It's the most interesting part of this for me.

As a kid I had multiple conversations in different groups of guys where the question of having sex with another guy for money came up, so I think I can vouch for guys. Even in groups of guys who weren't particularly intimate and didn't trust each other, you'd get exchanges like, "Dude, you are so in love with that guy you would suck his duck." "Fuck you, I'm not sucking anybody's dick." "So you wouldn't even for a million dollars?" "You saying you wouldn't? What are you trying to hide?"

As for girls, girlfriends have told me about giggly conversations they had with their friends when they were thirteen. The question naturally arises from the question of whether you would marry a gross old guy who had billions of dollars -- and that's something that all young girls talk about. It's an irresistible mixture of horror and fantasy. Start altering that story and you're only two or three steps from outright prostitution. (Amusingly, in the one story I remember pretty well, the question posed was, "Would you have sex with a guy for a million dollars, even if you didn't love him?" I guess to thirteen-year-old girls, love is the factor that makes everything okay or not okay, even prostitution.)

Another reason is how people reacted to the movie Indecent Proposal with Robert Redford, Demi Moore, and Woody Harrelson. It wasn't an alien idea for most people. Anytime people talked about it, they seemed to be picking up the threads of conversations from a long time ago. Of course, people are a lot less likely to talk about it with people they don't trust, especially when the intent seems to be hostile or transgressive.

[ErrantX]

I suspect what you're talking about is something entirely different... because they are just jokey/giggly conversations with no real meaning (there are all sorts of social pressures that set your price, for example).

Have you, as an adult, considered your price? My suggestion is few people have.

[photon_off]

Gosh, I just might be speaking from experience here.

How did you change?

[dkarl]

Serious question?

[photon_off]

Yeah. I realized after writing that it might appear to mean "in what ways have you changed" but I really did mean "how did you affect change in your life?"

[dkarl]

First, strangely enough, the internet helps. Things I have to get off my chest, but which I know will make me look strange or cranky or childish, can come off in relative anonymity. (And when I do get them off my chest, people respond more frankly, which helps.)

Second, I always knew there was something wrong with me socially, and I had the vague intention of improving at least as early as junior high. At first my ideas were pretty vague, and my progress depended on a trickle of new ideas from the pop science reading I did. Evolutionary psychology helped me see social relationships through ideas I already understood. It was always popularized hand-in-hand with a really bleak and brutal view of life (the perception that EP was just the paranoia of sexually insecure men, dressed up in scientific language, was probably created by some of the books I read) so it may have hurt more than it helped. Still, I started to get some insight into my limitations in high school. Then the book Emotional Intelligence came out around the time I graduated, and I read it cover to cover several times. It was just a self-help book, but it instantly clicked with me and gave coherence to a lot of half-formed ideas I had. It gave me an agenda of concrete items I could improve on. I remember there was a little section about how savvy kindergarten-age kids approached other children that actually helped me make friends in college.

Third, when I went to college I got a frame of reference for how normal, well-adjusted people who were informed and liberal would act. Back in high school I really couldn't parse out which differences between myself and everybody else were due to me being better-informed, more critical, and more liberal and which differences were due to me being socially retarded. Not only did I not really like the people around me, which made my social problems a lot more understandable than I realized at the time, I was literally afraid to emulate anybody around me because I might pick up customs that would make me look stupid when I finally broke out into the "real" wold. College released me from that. It's amazing how much more natural it is to emulate and learn from people you actually like, and whom you would like to be like.

Fourth, I realized that I had some emotional issues that were interfering with the proper functioning of my social skills. I.e., I'm a lot more socially competent when I feel good about myself. Trying to be social while you hate yourself is like trying to boot a computer with an inadequate power supply. Taking care of your emotions makes everything else easier.

[photon_off]

Thank you very much for the insights. Your style of writing, and I suspect thinking, resonates very strongly with me. If you wrote a book, I would buy it. I have a few more questions, and answers to them would not go unappreciated.

Would you still recommend Emotional Intelligence? In regards to #4, well, would you feel comfortable describing this in more detail? For example, in which ways is it easier or more difficult to be socially competent when you hate or don't hate yourself, and how have you managed to feel more confident about yourself? Finally, if you could recall the anecdote about the kindergarten kids, that'd be useful.

The reason I ask these questions is because, like you said, it's amazing how much more natural it is to emulate and learn from people you actually like and whom you would like to be like. Granted, I barely know you, but in terms of people on the internet that respond intelligently to questions, you rank pretty high.

[arthurdent]

I find this fascinating -- your reply and the parent to your reply (@Confusion) actually gave a lot of clarity to what I think on the matter.

I'm 5 years out of college and I think my position has changed significantly since then. Until probably a year out of college I only thought very abstractly about questions like this and believed there was a large class of problems for which there is no price.

Until a year or so after I graduated, I think I believed that most people (hookers excluded) wouldn't offer sex at any cash price. I always thought those transactions generally HAD to occur masked as "I'll buy you some beers/some dinners/we'll date/any time or cash value exchange in return for sex"

My more recent experience with regards to your experiment is almost the exact opposite of your findings. I'm consistently shocked by how LOW a price people are willing accept for all manner of tasks, including sex.

Not to sound way too shady, but I've since found that the cash price point for sex for most women is not only "no price", but in fact far lower than I would have imagined. Or maybe I've just met way sluttier girls since graduating. The price for most men is basically zero.

I'll also say there's likely some sort of phase transition here where the answer to "what kind of girl she is" is dependent on some socioeconomic indicator. Hypothesis: Money and status buy people a LOT of self importance and stricter adherence to a moral code. People don't have to bend their espoused morals unless faced with tough questions.

Re your experiment: - saying and doing are different, especially since the question seems to have been explicitly phrased as an exchange of sex for money. there are all sorts of ways to phrase the question where sex is understood but without actually saying it. - £1MM is doesn't even feel like a real number to most students. hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

Like @Confusion, I now generally believe there's a price for everything. If it can be measured in dollars, thats an easy question to answer. The hard questions are those that are measured in things money can't buy.

[ErrantX]

but I've since found that the cash price point for sex for most women is not only "no price", but in fact far lower than I would have imagined.

I have a theory about this actually. Do you have any specific data r.e. what "prices" were accepted?

My theory is that below a certain margin (I never tested this you see) then it becomes a different matter. At , say, £10,000 you are trading your body, it is transaction. You are gaining the money.

At a certain lower bound it switches to being simply an incentive. "I'll buy you dinner if you'll sleep with me after". i.e. it sweetens the deal.

I very much doubt that anyone, if offered $100 right here right now would take you up on the offer (but, then, I've never tested it)

[henrikschroder]

I very much doubt that anyone, if offered $100 right here right now would take you up on the offer

Well, he seems like a decent guy...

The price for most men is basically zero.

Oh, right.

[yosho]

honestly, I think most girls would sleep with someone for way less than 1 million. i think one very important missing ingredient is a clause stating that her decision will remain anonymous and no one will ever find out about the transaction, ever.

[araneae]

That actually doesn't surprise me, given the work of Dan Ariely. He's done similar experiments (but not with sex; with people doing some silly task on the computer) and found that people would do better on the task if their reward was a gift, like chocolate, then if there was a comparative dollar amount. The difference disappeared if he referred to it as "$5 worth of chocolate" versus "$5."

We think about getting paid with money differently than we think about getting paid with gifts, for some reason.

[drewcrawford]

I'd love to see a paper presented on this.

[ErrantX]

I'd consider writing an informal paper about it - but unfortunately it was a bit hacky and basically just followed our thoughts. So there is no way it would stand up to peer review properly.

I have the notes somewhere so I will try and dig them out and write something up (this was all done from memory plus a short type up I did at the time)