You know those super-fluffy "news" stories that begin with some sort of phrase like "A recent study showed..."? The ones that turn conventional wisdom on its head, or maybe prove conventional wisdom in some new and interesting way? Matthew Yglesias took a closer look at a study behind a story that began with this sentence: "Men are more likely to want to marry women who are their assistants at work rather than their colleagues or bosses, a University of Michigan study finds." Yglesias discovered that the study of "men" who wanted to marry "women" they work with was a test of "120 male and 208 female undergraduates" who were asked to "rate their attraction and desire to affiliate with a man and a woman they were said to know from work." And then he decided to drop some truth:

By the same logic, my study of human behavior indicates that Americans of both genders typically wake up between 10 and 11 a.m., and subsist primarily on Natty Light and pizza. Yet somehow everyone understands that college students’ behavior does not allow us to draw generalizable conclusions about human behavior.

The problem is not in the studies, of course. It's in the way that the media chooses to present the studies to the public. Next time someone writes a story re-imagining The Way We Live Our Lives, it might be smart to stick a link to Yglesias's post in the comments to the story.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Eric.)