Men who believe their penises to be small are drawn to sports cars, study says

Are men who drive flashy sports cars compensating for something after all? A study conducted at a London public university suggests that the old trope of men with less-than-average endowment turning to sports cars and other forms of "conspicuous consumption" may indeed be rooted in truth. As a group of men who tend to be drawn to flashy sports cars, this headline caught our eye. The study does not appear to be peer-reviewed, but the methodology is described in detail and the study authors claim their data indicate a psychological link between attraction to sports cars and the belief that one has a smaller-than-average penis.

I'd say we're all adults here, but this is a website dedicated to (and maintained by) grown human beings who are still really into cars. Our inner children are alive and well, and all of them giggle juuuuust a little bit at the word "penis."  So, I'm going to use a substitute. From now on, whenever you see "potato," just think "penis." Got it? Good. Here we go!

The researchers studied 200 men between ages 18 and 74. Due to the inherent unreliability of self-reported potato size, they decided that the simplest approach — ranking potato size relative to interest in sports cars — would be a dead end. Instead, the team designed a study that would convince the participants that they were having their memory evaluated in a multi-tasking environment. In other words, they had to read information while being served ads on the internet. How like life, no?

OK, it wasn't quite that simple, but it'll do for our purposes. Interspersed among the factoids were misleading statements about potato length intended to convince some participants that they perhaps don't grow potatoes as big as they thought, while others were led to believe that they were candidates for a blue ribbon at the State Fair of Idaho. After their sessions, the two groups were then asked to rate their interest in sports cars. Here's some documentary footage (NSFW; contains several potato references):

"Our primary hypothesis was that ratings for sports cars would increase when male participants were manipulated to believe that they have relatively small [potatoes]," the study authors said. "We tested a secondary hypothesis, that the link is driven by self-esteem in general, with other trials in that contained manipulated facts that might impact self-esteem in different ways, and a variety of luxury and non-luxury products. Finally, we analysed participants [sic] age, since it determines both mating strategies and patterns.