Unnamed comments on Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, or failing to perform basic sanity checks - Less Wrong

3 Post author: taw 16 September 2009 10:00AM

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Comment author: Unnamed 17 September 2009 12:17:01AM *  1 point [-]

Psychologists have noticed that there are sex differences on questions like 1-3, even though there cannot be sex differences in those behaviors, and have tried to explain that finding. See, for instance, this paper (pdf) by Baumeister, Catanese, & Vohs (2001) which argues that men have a stronger sex drive than women. They write (p. 250):

... Men actually report significantly more sex partners than women, across all studies (e.g., Janus & Janus, 1993; Laumann et al., 1994). Unfortunately this difference suffers from being logically impossible, insofar as heterosexual intercourse involves one man and one woman (so the mean tallies of partners should be equal). Several studies have sought to explain this recurrent finding, and the answers converge on motivated cognition: Some men, but fewer women, tend to rely on estimating the number of sex partners and hence round up, whereas women are more likely to rely on trying to enumerate all prior partners, which tends to lead to occasionally forgetting some partners and hence to producing an undercount (N. R. Brown & Sinclair, 1999; Wiederman, 1997).

...

In our view, the difference in the way people count sex partners is itself an indication that men want more than women.

They also note a study showing that men were more likely than women to classify oral or manual stimulation as sex.