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?

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....

They ask you at the end if you thought the experiment was real or if you thought the researchers fibbed. Then they exclude the ones who weren't fooled.

5ChristianKl14y

According to the study: [...] Basically the thought of being embarrsed by getting caught lying feels worse then the thought of admitting a high number of sexual partners. You don't need a lie detector that's 100% accurate to trigger that effect.

4Qiaochu_Yuan14y

Sure, but "more likely" here means a base rate of maybe 1% instead of a base rate of maybe 0.1%. Either way, the fact that they even mentioned lie detection is likely to scare people into telling the truth whether or not they believe (as opposed to alieve) that lie detectors work.

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