Survey Results: PMS Symptoms - by Scott Alexander
19% of women without post-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!
Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here, and sebjenseb confirms here. I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic because of PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
These are a numerical scale, compared to Aella’s Y/N, so to start I dichotomized them: “have PMS” was defined as a score of 3+, and “believe in supernatural” was 2+. I freely admit these were post hoc choices intended to capture as much variation as possible. I selected for cis women only, to avoid any confounds with hormones and whatever trans people’s menstruation situation is:
30% of those without PMS believed in the supernatural, compared to 48% of those with symptoms. Chi-square was significant at the < 0.001 level.
