Nicolas Guéguen seems to be a scientist who only takes on the trickiest of investigations, as his website shows. Witness his talent for conducting naturalistic experiments about issues that many people have wondered about and yet few (if any) have really tested – the likelihood of a woman being approached at a bar as a function of whether she is wearing cosmetics, for example, is one of his. And the positive correlation between waitresses’ tips and their breast size.

And he’s on a winner this time with a scientific study on the likelihood of a female hitchhiker being picked up, by either a male or female driver, as a function of her breast size.

For his current paper, Guéguen created one of three naturalistic experimental conditions (corresponding to three breast sizes) using an average looking female confederate, with:

• her actual breast size, which was an A cup (i.e., smaller than the French average); 
• a B cup using a a latex implant (the average size in France); 
• a C cup (greater than the French average). 

The female “hitch hiker” then stood at the side of a road and stuck her thumb out. Two observers coded the number of male and female drivers that drove by along with the number of times that a given driver stopped to pick her up.

The results (from Table 1, p. 1297 if you’re interested) show that statistically speaking, only male behaviour was affected by the hitchhiker’s breast size, and the different male responses to breast sizes were also statistically significant.

So men prefer to stop for women with bigger breasts.

Pretty damn obvious, you’d think, but wonderful to see it proved scientifically.