Why Multiple Perspectives Are Good in News

The headline in Reuters is "Creativity Linked to Sexual Success," detailing a study that shows creative types get more tail, or at least have more sex partners, than the non-creative types. Higher creative output means more people willing to put out. To whit, their hook:

Pablo Picasso, Lord Byron and Dylan Thomas had more in common than simple creativity. They also had active sex lives, which researchers said on Wednesday was no coincidence.

Over at Scientific American, the story takes a somewhat different angle in the first paragraph:

The list of promiscuous poets and artists is long, as is the list of poets' and artists' children who suffer from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Now new research links creative ability and sexual success--and explains why something as seemingly maladaptive as schizophrenia would persist among humans.

Seems the study in question does not just show that creative types are getting more than the rest of us. It shows that both traits are linked to a propensity for schizophrenic characteristics. Scientific American dwells on this more than the original press release, which points out that schizophrenic patients don't normally exhibit the high level of promiscuity, as other characteristics of schizophrenia tend to negate the womanizing.

Of interest, Reuters may be salacious with their headline, but it is the one from the original press release, and their lede is almost exactly the one from the press release. The title of the study is "Schizotypy, creativity and mating success in humans."