Men's chess more risky against beautiful women, says research paper

Chess news and chess trivia blog (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2010

Hi Everyone,

It's another of those gender things.

We found this very interesting paper on the Internet at the Gearybehaviourcenter. It says when men play chess against an attractive woman, they tend to adopt riskier strategies. However, women are not influenced by the looks of their male opponents while playing chess!

An abstract of the paper titled "Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess" states: We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on chess competitions which includes a control for the players' skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women's strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent."

In chess, the term aggressive play is used when indicating a strategy that reduces the

drawing probability while the term solid play is used to indicate a strategy that reduces the

winning/losing probabilities.

You can read the full paper here. The credit for the research goes to Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark. It's kind of technical but you will enjoy it.

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