That's very insightful, thanks! I'm gonna look into what can I do.

> Does it matter? Contemporary and local phenomena are also worth studying.

Yes. How contemporary? How local? There's a reason we don't study a single person doing something on a random day. It's too contemporary and too local. There's a limit at which the money spent on the research is being set on fire.

> but about competitive character in psychology and social dynamics in general

This is literally my point. This research isn't about anything in general, which is why it's not interesting. It is a tiny study of a very specific population at a single point in time. It doesn't tell us about anything in general at all.

> Like the already generic takeaway "intrasexually competitive people sabotage others through means of advice" (that can just as well apply to ancient Rome or space colonies in 2500).

The takeaway is so generic it isn't worth proving with research. I believe in learning things just to learn them, but why do we need to spend public funds to quantify things that are so obvious they are in plays from a thousand years ago?

Should we also study whether sexually competitive males play basketball more aggressively against each other?

With infinite time and money, this would absolutely be worthwhile, but there isn't value in aimlessly quantifying things just to get a headline and get published.

> Congratulations, you found a reason this topic deserved study.

What reason is that? Because it's so specific, weak, and unimportant that I have to ask many more questions to find a way it could lead to any sort of conclusion?

That makes no sense. By those criteria, everything is worth studying, regardless of cost.

For example, if someone studied what women like to eat at lunchtime in Perth, Australia, I'd have a similar set of questions. The data from that study is not wholly uninteresting, but it needs to have some underlying theory of why the public should fund it before it gets public funding.

And then there's the question of opportunity cost. What else could these researchers have been studying instead?

Observations in person with people that told me why they did what they did

Several “couldn’t say no to my friend” who had just recently got into performing lip injections

I never considered observations on the internet as being worth commenting on, would that have greater weight to you?

Not everything needs a paper if you experienced it in the flesh.

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More like the phrase comes from observed behavioral patterns in reproduction habits of women stemming from biological evolution. The more they can back-stab each other and drag the others down, the higher the chance of getting a higher value male.

Women don't have the testosterone fueled violent tendencies of males to get into physical competition to assert dominance over sexual competitors, so they resort to more subtle and cunning ways of "thinning the herd" of sexual competitors.

or "misery loves company"

trimmed not shaven... that's where id put it