Borrowed Fire

I · The Document That Opens

The message arrives; the pulse lifts; the dead document opens. A proposal that looked inert an hour ago suddenly has a title, a first paragraph, and the beginnings of a future. Anyone who has worked for themselves knows the sensation, and most people have a private theory about it. The most seductive theory is “sexual energy,” a phrase that does the work of an entire physics: it implies a quantity, conserved, measurable, and—this is the part that sells books—transferable from the bedroom to the balance sheet. It is worth saying at the outset that no such quantity has been found. There is no study in which desire is decanted into revenue. What there is, and what this essay is about, is a set of ordinary mechanisms that between them can feel remarkably like one.

The trouble with the folk theory is not that it is mystical. It is that it compresses four different things into a single word, and the four are studied by four different literatures that mostly do not talk to one another. The first is activation: a bodily and motivational state, the raised pulse, the sense that something is imminent. The second is tension, which is not a state at all but a relation—an unresolved question about another person, held open. The third is communication: what two people actually say to each other, and in what manner, which turns out to be the part of this story with the most evidence behind it and the least glamour. And the fourth is the thing everyone actually wants to know about, success in business, which is itself three outcomes wearing one name: work begun, work finished, and work that somebody pays for.

Keeping them apart is not pedantry; it is the whole method. A finding about activation tells you nothing about whether the market will buy. A finding about partner support tells you nothing about arousal. And a finding about what one person feels tells you conspicuously little about what the other one is experiencing across the table—a point this essay will come back to, because it is the point most often skipped.

II · What the Body Is Actually Doing

Begin with the machinery, because it is the part most often described wrongly. In 2005, the psychologist Arthur Aron, the anthropologist Helen Fisher, the neuroscientist Lucy Brown, and their colleagues put seventeen people—ten women and seven men, intensely in love for periods of one to seventeen months—into a scanner and showed each of them a photograph of the beloved, alternating with a photograph of a familiar acquaintance and a distracting arithmetic task. What lit up, specifically for the beloved, was the right ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus: dopamine-rich structures that belong not to the emotion systems but to the reward-and-motivation systems, the ones that organize a mammal around getting something. Activation in one caudate region tracked the intensity of romantic passion as the participants themselves had scored it.

Seventeen people is seventeen people, and the study makes no claim about work. But the anatomical fact is the useful one, because it corrects the metaphor. Romantic desire does not run a generator. It runs a motivation system, whose function is to make one object in the world matter more than the others and to keep the organism oriented toward it. The right word is not fuel. The right word is salience. And salience, unlike fuel, comes pre-committed: it arrives already pointed at something, and the something is not your business plan.

What about the folk conviction that a charge picked up in one place can be spent in another? That intuition has a distinguished ancestor. In 1974, the psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron reported that men interviewed by a young woman on a swaying suspension bridge over a Vancouver canyon were more likely to write sexual imagery into a story afterward, and more likely to telephone her later, than men interviewed on a solid bridge nearby. The finding entered the culture as proof that arousal is fungible—that fear can be spent as attraction. It has also been argued about ever since, and for a good reason: in a field study on a public bridge, the experimenters could not control who chose to cross the frightening one or who chose to approach the interviewer, and self-selection is a stubborn alternative explanation.

Even taken at its friendliest, though, the misattribution literature does not say what people want it to say. What transfers, in these accounts, is the label—a body already stirred, reading its own state off the nearest available cause. Nothing is added to the account. The physiology is not a battery being discharged into a new circuit; it is a reading being given a new name. Anyone hoping to bank a surplus should note that the theory does not describe a surplus.

There is one more piece of received wisdom to dispose of here, since it will otherwise be smuggled in later. Everyone in business has heard that performance follows an inverted U—too little arousal and you are flat, too much and you fall apart, and somewhere in the middle is the productive zone. This is the Yerkes–Dodson law, and it comes from a 1908 paper by the psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson in which dancing mice learned to enter a white chamber rather than a black one under electric shocks of graded strength. Their actual conclusion was conditional, and more interesting than the slogan it became: “an easily acquired habit, that is one which does not demand difficult sense discriminations or complex associations, may readily be formed under strong stimulation, whereas a difficult habit may be acquired readily only under relatively weak stimulation.” When the black and the white were easy to tell apart, in other words, the strongest shock taught fastest. The optimum they found varies inversely with the difficulty of the task, and the generalization to human performance under emotional arousal is a later extrapolation made by other hands. It should be quoted with that provenance attached.

III · The Narrowing

If desire is a motivation state, the natural next question is what such states do to thinking—and here the literature offers a genuinely interesting hypothesis, followed by a genuinely instructive mess. In 2008, the psychologists Philip Gable and Eddie Harmon-Jones proposed that the received wisdom about positive mood had confounded two things. Earlier work had shown that feeling good broadens attention. But the good feelings used in those studies were the relaxed, contented, low-approach kind. Gable and Harmon-Jones argued that positive states high in approach motivation—wanting, reaching for, closing in on—should do the opposite and narrow attention, because an animal moving toward a desired object has every reason to shut out the periphery. Across four studies, that is what they reported.

It is a beautiful hypothesis, and it maps onto the experience this essay began with: the world going quiet, the document filling the screen. It is also, at present, unsettled. A registered replication led by Irena Domachowska and colleagues in 2016 found the narrowing against neutral controls but did not reproduce the full original pattern. Then, in 2022, Alberto De Luca, Stephan Verschoor, and Bernhard Hommel ran four online experiments of about eighty participants each and found nothing at all—no effect of valence, no effect of motivational intensity, on the global-versus-local task at the heart of the claim—and concluded that the empirical basis for a systematic relationship between mood, motivation, and breadth of processing is weak. Their mood inductions worked. The effect did not appear.

What survives all this is smaller and duller than the headline. The most defensible statement about mood and thinking comes from a meta-analysis by the psychologists Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad, who pooled a hundred and two effect sizes and found that positive moods do beat neutral controls on creativity—by a correlation of about .15, which is modest—and that the benefit concentrates in the activating, approach-motivated, promotion-focused positive states rather than the relaxed ones. Happiness helps a little. Contentment does not. That is a real finding, and it is about mood categories, not about anybody in particular.

Which brings us to the specifically erotic version of the claim, and to its collapse. In 2006, the psychologists Vladas Griskevicius, Robert Cialdini, and Douglas Kenrick reported across four experiments that romantic motives increased creative displays—for men, after any mating cue; for women, only when primed to attract a high-quality long-term partner. It is worth noticing what the authors themselves said about the mechanism: the boosts were unrelated to increased effort on the tasks, and applying cash incentives did not change them. Whatever was happening, it was not that desire made people work harder.

Nineteen years later, the psychologists Katarzyna Galasinska, Aleksandra Szymkow, and Marco Antonio Correa Varella put the idea through a larger and more naturalistic test: four hundred and eighty-three people writing self-promotional biographies after viewing attractive or unattractive profiles on a simulated dating portal. They found no significant creativity difference between the conditions. A second study of four hundred and ninety-four people found effects that were modest and dependent on context—and, in the pathway where an attractive long-term partner was in view, greater sexual arousal was associated with lower fluency and lower originality. Meanwhile, the one paper in this area that everybody remembers—the elegant 2009 result holding that love promotes global, creative thought while sex promotes local, analytic thought—now carries a formal statement of institutional concern from its journal, published after the author’s own university requested a retraction over the veracity of the findings. It should not be carrying anybody’s business case.

IV · The Rent

So much for activation. Tension is a different animal, and the research that pins it down is a small, mischievous study from 2011. The psychologists Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert told college women that four male students had looked at their profiles and rated them—that the men had liked them a great deal, or liked them an average amount, or, in the third condition, that it was one or the other and the women would not be told which. Reciprocity behaved as the textbooks promise: being liked a lot beat being liked averagely. But the women in the uncertain condition were the most attracted of all, more attracted than the women who had been assured of enthusiasm. And the measured reason was not mysterious. Uncertain participants reported thinking about the men the most, and it was the thinking that carried the attraction.

That is what sexual tension is, operationally: an unresolved question that will not stop being asked. Its active ingredient is not heat but occupancy. It runs in the background, it re-opens the same file, it rehearses the exchange that has not happened yet, and it does all this with the same faculty that a person also needs in order to price a contract or find a bug.

The evidence that attention is what gets spent is circumstantial but consistent. The psychologist Jon Maner and his colleagues showed, across five studies, that observers of both sexes attend selectively to physically attractive female faces, and that constraining attentional capacity biases the frequency estimates people afterward make about how many such faces they saw. A more provocative result comes from the Dutch psychologist Johan Karremans and colleagues, who reported in 2009 that men’s performance on a cognitive task declined after a brief mixed-sex encounter—more so where the woman was rated more attractive, and more so among men who reported caring how they came across. That study rests on small samples, its follow-up on mere anticipation drew a published methodological comment, and it is best read as a plausible and unresolved hazard rather than a measured tax rate. But its direction is the same as everything else here.

The reason this matters for the question at hand is arithmetical. The story people tell about desire at work is that it adds something. What the tension literature describes is a withdrawal—from an account that is not large, and out of which the actual work must also be paid. It is entirely possible for a person to feel more alive, more alert, and more purposeful while producing less, and to experience the deficit as evidence of how important the project has become.

V · The Conversation

Now the half of the question that turns out to have the evidence. In 1997, the psychologists Arthur Aron, Edward Melinat, Elaine Aron, Robert Vallone, and Renee Bator published a procedure. Pairs of strangers were given three sets of questions to work through together over about forty-five minutes, escalating from the light to the disclosing, each answering in turn. A control condition made small talk for the same duration. The escalating-disclosure pairs ended up reliably closer, by a measure taken immediately afterward. The procedure has since become famous, in a slightly garbled form, as a parlour game.

What is less famous is the rest of the paper, which is the interesting part. In two further studies, the authors tested whether closeness would be increased by matching the pairs on important attitudes, or by leading them to expect that they would like each other, or by making getting close an explicit goal. None of these helped. Anticipation did nothing. Compatibility did nothing. What produced closeness was the structure of the exchange—reciprocal, escalating, and mutual—and it produced it between strangers assigned to each other by a psychology department.

From there the findings assemble into something a working person can use. The psychologist Shelly Gable and her colleagues, in four studies, examined what happens when people tell someone about a good thing that has happened to them—a practice they call capitalization. Sharing the event raised positive affect and well-being above and beyond the event itself; and when the listener responded actively and constructively, rather than flatly or dismissively, the benefit was larger still. Richard Koestner and colleagues then drew the distinction that matters most for goals. In the first of three studies, conducted between romantic partners over three months, autonomy support—defined as empathic perspective-taking, understanding what the other person is actually trying to do—predicted progress on personal goals, and the benefit was mediated by enhanced autonomous motivation. Across all three studies, directive support, the provision of positive guidance, was only marginally related to progress and unrelated to relationship quality or well-being. Telling someone what to do about their venture is, on this evidence, close to inert. Understanding what they are trying to build is not.

Brittany Jakubiak and Brooke Feeney added the daily texture, in two diary studies of newlyweds and of older married couples: spousal support—defined as availability, encouragement, and, tellingly, noninterference—enabled goal progress the same day and the next. And behind all of it sits the Michelangelo phenomenon, described in 1999 by Stephen Drigotas, Caryl Rusbult, and their colleagues: partners can affirm the self each of them is trying to become, sculpting rather than merely admiring.

It would be convenient to stop there, and it would be a misrepresentation. Two results cut the other way and both are large. The first is the meta-analysis by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, who assembled six hundred and seven effect sizes across some twenty-three thousand observations and found that feedback interventions raise performance on average—by about four-tenths of a standard deviation—while more than a third of them lower it. Being told about yourself is not automatically productive; it depends on where the attention goes. The second is stranger and closer to home. In three experiments, the psychologists Grainne Fitzsimons and Eli Finkel found that merely thinking about how a partner is helpful for a goal reduced people’s planned effort on that goal and increased their procrastination on it—and that the participants who reduced their effort reported higher commitment to that person than the participants who did not. They called it outsourcing self-regulation. A supportive person can become, without anyone intending it, a reason to do less.

VI · The Second Person

Every claim so far has been about one participant: the one who feels the charge, opens the document, and later tells the story. The other participant has been measured too, separately and by a different research community, and the results are not symmetrical. In 2009, the organizational psychologists Jennifer Berdahl and Karl Aquino surveyed two hundred and thirty-eight manufacturing and social-service workers, and then just over a thousand university staff, about their exposure to sexual behaviour at work—jokes, remarks, propositions—and about how much they had enjoyed or been bothered by it. Fifty-eight per cent of the first sample had been exposed in two years; forty per cent of the second in one. Some women and many men said they had enjoyed it. And then the finding that gives the paper its weight: exposure predicted worse psychological and work outcomes even for the employees who said they enjoyed the experience.

That was cross-sectional, which invites the usual objection about which way the arrow runs. In 2024, Sabine Hommelhoff, David Richter, and Susanne Scheibe answered it with a two-wave panel of nearly nineteen hundred working adults. Perceived frequency of sexual jokes and conversations at work in the first year predicted lower job satisfaction, higher anger, and more sick days—on the order of two additional days a year—in the second, controlling for the baseline. The effects were small. Neither gender nor age moderated them. About half the sample said such talk was common where they worked, and the authors found no significant change in that after the MeToo movement.

There is a further asymmetry, upstream of all this, in whether the two people are even reading the same signal. In a speed-meeting study of a hundred and ninety-nine participants, the psychologists Carin Perilloux, Judith Easton, and David Buss found the familiar pattern—men overestimating women’s sexual interest—and also its neglected mirror image: women systematically underestimating men’s. Perilloux herself later complicated the standard interpretation, arguing with the psychologist Robert Kurzban that men may be reporting accurately while women understate, which drew two published comments in reply. The dispute is unresolved and this essay takes no side in it. The uncontested residue is enough: the sender’s reading of a charged exchange is not evidence of the receiver’s, and the discrepancy runs in a predictable direction.

None of which means that warmth at work is a hazard to be engineered out. The most careful study of the deliberate version—Laura Kray, Connson Locke, and Alex Van Zant’s correlational study and three experiments on what they call feminine charm, friendliness combined with flirtation—found exactly the two-sided result its authors reported: costs and benefits, spanning both economic and social measures. It is not a technique with a payoff; it is a trade with a price attached. And on the plainest question of all, whether workplace romance makes people better at their jobs, Charles Pierce and Herman Aguinis found in a survey of four hundred and sixty-five employees that participation predicted higher job satisfaction and, more weakly, organizational commitment—but was not predictive of job performance or of intrinsic work motivation. People were happier. The work was the same.

VII · The New York Audit

Suppose all the intermediate links held. The last one is a market, and markets have been asked about this directly. In 2009, the management scholars Xiao-Ping Chen, Xin Yao, and Suresh Kotha analysed venture-capital funding decisions as an exercise in persuasion, examining what in a business-plan presentation actually moved the investor. The answer was preparedness. Displayed passion—the intense affective state, visible in the room, that the entire founder mythology is built on—did not positively affect the decision to fund.

The rest of the entrepreneurship literature says the same thing in slower motion. Brandon Mueller, Marcus Wolfe, and Iman Syed, using multi-source survey data with performance lagged by a year, found that passion reaches venture performance only through the mediating machinery of self-regulation and grit—that is, through what a person does on Tuesday, not through what they feel on Monday. Eva de Mol and colleagues studied a hundred and seven new-venture teams in an accelerator and found that average team passion was not significantly related to performance, while passion diversity—particularly separation in intensity between members—was negatively related to it. A team is not warmed by the hottest member. It is cooled by the distance between them. And the Canadian organizational psychologist Jacques Forest and colleagues had already drawn the distinction that makes sense of the whole picture: harmonious passion, held alongside the rest of a life, tracked mental health, flow, vitality, and commitment; obsessive passion, the kind that has taken the wheel, negatively predicted mental health.

Now the uncomfortable finding, which is genuinely about attraction and business and which points in an unexpected direction. In 2014, Alison Wood Brooks, Laura Huang, Sarah Wood Kearney, and Fiona Murray examined ninety pitches at three American competitions and ran two experiments alongside. Investors preferred pitches presented by men, even when the content was identical: in the audio experiment, five hundred and twenty-one listeners heard the same script in a man’s or a woman’s voice, and 68.33 per cent funded the male-narrated version against 31.67 per cent for the female. The gender effect was moderated by male physical attractiveness—attractive men were more persuasive still—while women’s attractiveness made no difference at all.

It is important to be precise about what this is evidence of. It is not evidence that attraction gives a founder energy, or focus, or better ideas. Every founder in the audio experiment was the same founder. What varied was the listener. Brooks and colleagues did not find a property of the entrepreneur; they found a defect in the audit, and one that a woman with an identical company cannot borrow her way out of.

Set against that, the evidence for the other input—the conversation—is unglamorous and keeps arriving. The negotiation scholar Jared Curhan and the computational social scientist Alex Pentland had a computer microcode the first five minutes of a simulated employment negotiation and found that activity level, conversational engagement, prosodic emphasis, and vocal mirroring predicted about thirty per cent of the variance in individual outcomes—with the winning pattern differing by whether the speaker held the stronger or the weaker hand. Amy Edmondson, studying fifty-one work teams in a manufacturing company, found that psychological safety—the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk—predicted learning behaviour, which in turn mediated the link to team performance, while team efficacy did not. Anita Woolley and colleagues reported in Science that group performance across varied tasks loaded on a general factor correlated with members’ social sensitivity and with the equality of conversational turn-taking rather than with their individual intelligence—a result that Marcus Credé and Garett Howardson later re-examined across six samples and judged weakly supported, so it belongs here with its challenger attached.

Imagine the same distinction at a New York pitch table. The founder can bring a finished demonstration, a disciplined account of the customer, and a conversation in which the listener is allowed to ask difficult questions. A private attraction may have helped the founder open the file that morning, but the listener cannot audit that feeling and has no reason to finance it. The tangible work and the exchange across the table are the parts that can be inspected.

This is a New York application of the experiments, not a claim that the city’s investors behave differently from other investors. It gives the founder a practical separation to keep: the impulse that begins the work belongs to the person; the evidence offered to somebody else must stand after the impulse has passed.

VIII · Borrowed Fire

In New York, a professional introduction, a creative collaboration, and an attraction can begin in the same crowded room. That proximity is an occasion for clarity, not evidence that one kind of energy has been converted into another. The work must still be finished, the other person must remain free to decline, and the market must still be asked its own question. This is an application of the evidence to a New York setting, not a measured city effect.

So: can sexual tension and communication make a person more successful in business? The two halves of that question have to be answered separately, because the evidence does not treat them alike. Communication—affirmation, autonomy support, active-constructive listening, reciprocal disclosure, safety, turn-taking—has a real and reasonably durable relationship with goal progress and with team performance, in studies that were not looking for a romance and did not need one. It is also, notably, learnable and available in every direction: to colleagues, to cofounders, to a spouse who will never see the product. Sexual tension has no comparable record. What it reliably supplies is salience and occupancy, and both of those are withdrawals from an account the work is also drawing on.

That is not the same as nothing. The document really did open. A state of high approach motivation is a good state in which to begin something, sketch something, or finish a prototype that has been sitting at ninety per cent for a month, and there is no reason to be pious about where it came from. The practical division of labour follows from the evidence rather than from morals: let activation do generative work, where a bad idea costs an hour, and let a night’s sleep stand between the state and anything consequential—the price, the spend, the equity split, the promise. Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein showed that sexually aroused male students mispredicted their own sexual judgments; that is not a study of corporate decisions, and this essay declines to pretend otherwise, but it is an excellent argument against treating a hot state as a neutral one. Draft hot; decide cold. Then measure the artifact rather than the intensity that preceded it, since the artifact is the only part of this that a market will ever see.

Two cautions survive the whole literature. The first is that the second person in the room is not a resource. Attraction, mutual or otherwise, is not consent to become a muse, a collaborator, or a cofounder, and the workplace evidence is unusually consistent that the ambient version of all this is costly to the people around it—including, on the measured outcomes, some of the people who said they were enjoying themselves. The second is that the story is seductive precisely because it flatters. It converts a private, uneven, largely involuntary experience into a business asset, and it does so at the moment when a person most wants their preoccupation to be productive.

The image in the title is the honest one, and it is worth taking literally. Fire can be borrowed. It can be carried some distance and it will light what it touches. But it belongs to the place it came from, it goes out on its own schedule, and it has never yet written a business model, established consent, or persuaded the market to care.

Notes on Sources

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Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 510–517.†

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, 459–482.

Gable, P. A., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2008). Approach-motivated positive affect reduces breadth of attention. Psychological Science, 19, 476–482.† Domachowska, I., Heitmann, C., Deutsch, R., Goschke, T., Scherbaum, S., & Bolte, A. (2016). Registered replication report. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 67, 50–56. De Luca, A., Verschoor, S., & Hommel, B. (2022). No correlation between mood or motivation and the processing of global and local information. Experimental Psychology, 69, 253–266.

Baas, M., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Nijstad, B. A. (2008). A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 779–806.

Griskevicius, V., Cialdini, R. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (2006). Peacocks, Picasso, and parental investment: the effects of romantic motives on creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 63–76.†

Galasinska, K., Szymkow, A., & Correa Varella, M. A. (2025). The influence of mating context on creativity: insights from simulated dating scenarios. Evolutionary Psychology, 23(2).

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2016). Statement of institutional concern regarding Förster, Epstude, and Özelsel (2009), “Why love has wings and sex has not.”†

Whitchurch, E. R., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2011). “He loves me, he loves me not…”: uncertainty can increase romantic attraction. Psychological Science, 22, 172–175.

Maner, J. K., Kenrick, D. T., Becker, D. V., Delton, A. W., Hofer, B., Wilbur, C. J., & Neuberg, S. L. (2003). Sexually selective cognition: beauty captures the mind of the beholder. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 1107–1120. Karremans, J. C., Verwijmeren, T., Pronk, T. M., & Reitsma, M. (2009). Interacting with women can impair men’s cognitive functioning. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1041–1044.†

Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. N., Vallone, R. D., & Bator, R. J. (1997). The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness: a procedure and some preliminary findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 363–377.

Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 228–245.

Koestner, R., Powers, T. A., Carbonneau, N., Milyavskaya, M., & Chua, S. N. (2012). Distinguishing autonomous and directive forms of goal support. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 1609–1620.

Jakubiak, B. K., & Feeney, B. C. (2016). Daily goal progress is facilitated by spousal support and promotes psychological, physical, and relational well-being throughout adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, 317–340. Drigotas, S. M., Rusbult, C. E., Wieselquist, J., & Whitton, S. W. (1999). Close partner as sculptor of the ideal self: behavioral affirmation and the Michelangelo phenomenon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 293–323.

Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 254–284. Fitzsimons, G. M., & Finkel, E. J. (2011). Outsourcing self-regulation. Psychological Science, 22, 369–375.

Berdahl, J. L., & Aquino, K. (2009). Sexual behavior at work: fun or folly? Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 34–47. Hommelhoff, S., Richter, D., & Scheibe, S. (2024). Sexual jokes and conversations at the workplace and their relation to employee well-being. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 97, 767–775.

Perilloux, C., Easton, J. A., & Buss, D. M. (2012). The misperception of sexual interest. Psychological Science, 23, 146–151. Perilloux, C., & Kurzban, R. (2015). Do men overperceive women’s sexual interest? Psychological Science, 26, 70–77.

Kray, L. J., Locke, C. C., & Van Zant, A. B. (2012). Feminine charm: an experimental analysis of its costs and benefits in negotiations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 1343–1357. Pierce, C. A., & Aguinis, H. (2003). Romantic relationships in organizations: a test of a model of formation and impact factors. Management Research, 1, 161–169.

Chen, X.-P., Yao, X., & Kotha, S. (2009). Entrepreneur passion and preparedness in business plan presentations. Academy of Management Journal, 52, 199–214.

Mueller, B. A., Wolfe, M. T., & Syed, I. (2017). Passion and grit: an exploration of the pathways leading to venture success. Journal of Business Venturing, 32, 260–279. De Mol, E., Cardon, M. S., de Jong, B., Khapova, S. N., & Elfring, T. (2020). Entrepreneurial passion diversity in new venture teams. Journal of Business Venturing, 35, 105965. Forest, J., Mageau, G. A., Sarrazin, C., & Morin, E. M. (2011). “Work is my passion”. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 28, 27–40.

Brooks, A. W., Huang, L., Kearney, S. W., & Murray, F. E. (2014). Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 4427–4431.

Curhan, J. R., & Pentland, A. (2007). Thin slices of negotiation: predicting outcomes from conversational dynamics within the first 5 minutes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 802–811. Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 350–383.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330, 686–688.† Credé, M., & Howardson, G. (2017). The structure of group task performance—a second look at “collective intelligence”. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102, 1483–1492.

Ariely, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2006). The heat of the moment: the effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 87–98.

† marks contested science, and the clause is different in each case. Dutton and Aron’s bridge study cannot rule out self-selection into the frightening bridge or into the approach. Gable and Harmon-Jones’s narrowing effect was partly reproduced in a registered replication and then not found at all in four later online experiments. Griskevicius and colleagues’ positive mating-prime result is set here against a larger null and a conditional negative. The 2009 paper covered by the PSPB statement of institutional concern is named only so that readers do not encounter it elsewhere as evidence; it is used as none. Karremans and colleagues’ cognitive-cost finding rests on small samples and its follow-up drew a published comment. Woolley and colleagues’ collective-intelligence factor was judged weakly supported in Credé and Howardson’s re-analysis of six samples. Taken together, these studies establish neither a transferable sexual energy nor a causal route from attraction to business success. The chain drawn in Fig. 1—activation, attention, work begun, work finished, market response—is an editorial synthesis, and every joint in it is conditional.

Drafted with AI (OpenAI and Anthropic) and fact-checked against the primary publications listed above, August 21, 2026; every citation was checked against the publication record, and the contested ones are marked. Edited, and answered for, by humans. Set, with affection and without affiliation, in the manner of a certain Manhattan weekly.New York revision drafted with AI on October 12, 2026; editorial review pending. ◆