A 69 year old man’s penis captured America’s attention in last month’s Republican debate. Donald Trump broadcast the size of his penis on national television in a response to Marco Rubio’s comment on his small “hands”: If they’re small, something else must be small.

Lifting his hands from the podium, Trump declared to the country, “Look at these hands! Are these small hands?” He added, “I guarantee you, there’s no problem.” As an indication of the importance of the topic, the media responded with extensive coverage of the moment for weeks.

Clearly, penis size is an important attribute. As the comments by Trump and Rubio indicate, the matter at hand isn’t just about size—it’s about the link to a many other skills and capabilities. What kind of skills is penis size connected to? Could it be ability in business, confidence, leadership? What else?

To find out, we studied over 1,400 people across the country to better understand the relationship between penis size and various skills and attributes.

Not everyone may agree on how many inches constitutes a small or large penis, so to measure the means, we used a scale that measured magnitude instead of inches. Positive numbers indicate largeness while negative numbers indicate smallness.

Men with large penises were:

• more confident (41.78)
• more likely to ask for the phone number of a person more attractive than themselves (30.98)
• better lovers (30.12)
• and generally better at sex (29.34)
• with a higher sex drive (27.7).

Taking attributes related to sex out of the picture, the top five attributes become:

• being more confident (41.78)
• more willing to ask for an undeserved pay raise at work (21.76)
• being more optimistic (19.04)
• and taking more risk by both not fearing walking home at night in an unsafe part of town (19.02)
• and by engaging in dangerous recreational sports (17.94).

The top 5 attributes men with small penises exhibited were:

• voting for Donald Trump (-16.2)
• being religious (-11.9)
• more inclined to gossip (-9.54)
• being good at math (-9.64)
• and driving a large car (-8.36).

We also asked our participants to report their actual penis measurements and found an interesting distinction along political party lines. Democrats and Republicans equally inflated their size by adding on an extra inch compared with the national length average, but Republicans reported significantly larger ball sizes (11.5) than did Democrats (6.04). Do Republicans really have larger balls or do they only believe they do? This is an important question for future research.

One final note: While Donald Trump supporters seem to have smaller penises, it is important to note that this initial research focused on the size of erect penises. Donald Trump never made it clear (and interestingly no journalist asked him) if he was referring to the erect or flaccid size. Regardless of what state of penis Donald Trump had in mind, since men spend most of their days with a flaccid penis, the question about the size when flaccid is just as important, if not more important, and we hope to study it in the years to come.