Hard to tell if there is anything meaningful in the study. Like most psychological studies it used students as subjects. I am not surprised that the only thing they could remember was the remark about sex. Quite likely the "meat" wasn't anything of particular interest. Contrast that with a lecture to professional programmers on Hadoop. An OT story or remark would be just an ice breaker and not the main take-away.
Take-away here: psychological studies on students tell you something about students, not necessarily about the rest of us.
rp, in theory, that makes sense. But I think there's a category error possibly at work. Hung out with many average (read: normal) college kids lately? :)
The same exact issue you cite is a major reason why I - as a usability professional - am always warning people against believing what Jakob Nielsen & others preach as a result of their usability studies.
I love the Overcoming Bias blog, so I was a little taken aback at how quickly they took this study at face value, & how nobody in the comments questioned the lack of connection between the main topic & the details, etc etc. That's not the kind of rigorous thinking I've come to expect from the blog dedicatd to dissecting biases!
FWIW, I wrote this blog post - but I sure as hell didn't expect to find it here on HN. It was simply the result of a moment of pique.
Take-away here: psychological studies on students tell you something about students, not necessarily about the rest of us.