Evolution, Sex, and Gender, Not to Mention Research

NancyLebovitz

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

So how sketchy is the research on human sexual behavior, anyway?

From The New York Times:

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

So how sketchy is the research on human sexual behavior, anyway?

Link to the original study: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224490309552164

As far as to the sample they studied:

An initial sample of 248 male and female undergraduates at a regional campus of a Midwestern university participated as partial fulfillment of a research requirement in their Introductory Psychology course. To keep the sample somewhat homogenous, we used only data from unmarried, heterosexual, 18- to 25-year-old participants.

4NancyLebovitz14y

Thanks. So it's a rather small and unrepresentative sample for men and women in general, but the study does supply a clue about whether people answer scientific study questions accurately. Of course, we still don't know about their actual sex lives, and we don't know how many decided that it was worth bluffing the "lie detector". Edited to add: I'd expect college students to be more likely to have heard that even real lie detectors aren't accurate. I could be wrong about that....

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