Coffee makes men more sociable and women better looking

Every office worker knows that the most important fixed asset a company owns is its coffee machine. In our firm, we have just one coffee machine for the whole team and if that breaks down, employee motivation and productivity craters. There must be something in this stuff that keeps people going and increases wellbeing.

A team from the University of Coimbra in Portugal tried to find out. For three weeks they gave half their test subjects caffeinated coffee and the other half decaf coffee. The results were striking.

Men who drank caffeinated coffee gained less weight than men who drank decaf. They also showed higher motivation and greater sociability, hanging out with their mates more often and for longer and getting into fewer fights. In short, men need coffee to act well in a group. If they don’t have access to caffeine, motivation drops and fights may break out. Now if you could please tell my bosses so we can buy a second coffee machine as a backup, that would be much appreciated.

Women, on the other hand, showed no statistically different weight gain whether they were on regular or decaf coffee, but just like men, having to drink decaf coffee reduced motivation.

Another statistically significant difference was in self-care. Men didn’t change their grooming behaviours whether they were on decaf or regular coffee, but women on decaf coffee spent significantly less time grooming themselves. Perhaps that goes hand in hand with a greater emphasis on hierarchy that is observed in women drinking caffeinated coffee, perhaps not. For sure, though, women drinking caffeinated coffee tend to look better than women drinking decaf.

If you want to know why these behavioural changes happen, you can read up on it in the study. Thanks to a bunch of neurological tests, the researchers could trace exactly which neural processes are changing when we are drinking caffeine and how that triggers these behavioural changes. And they could do that because the test subjects were all mice.

What is that? I didn’t mention that? Well, it is obvious that these test subjects couldn’t be humans because no ethics board would allow the researchers to withhold caffeine from humans for three weeks as they did with mice. What with all the fights breaking out among the men in the office.