A new scientific study shows that overweight women are more impulsive in making decisions than those with an average weight in the control group. Male subjects exhibited the same degree of rationality in making decisions, no matter their body mass index. Researchers have no clue as to why obese women prefer making hasty decisions, but they argue that it may have something to do with the eating-related disinhibition personality trait.
 

The research team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Psychology, led by Rosalyn Weller, PhD, subjected all participants to the study to a simple test, meant to determine how each individual responded to immediate gratification. This test proposed respondents to choose between receiving a large, hypothetical sum of money right away or an even-larger one at intervals ranging from a couple of weeks to 10 years.
 

The test was designed to reflect the reality of today's market, so all participants were asked to make the decisions as they would make them in real life. All obese women chose more money, short-term, while all other three groups – women with an average weight, obese, and average men – selected more money after a longer period of wait.
 

"Our study found that obese men have more impulse control than obese women. So, obese men may be protected from more impulsive behavior on the delay-discounting task by having lower dis-inhibition in general. Obese women may have the double whammy of being female and having higher body mass index," explained Weller.
 

Currently, the next phase of the study involves subjecting the respondents to an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine, while answering questionnaires. This will, hopefully, shed some light on the intricate processes associated with decision-making in the brains of obese women, as opposed to those of regular ones.