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?
This is interesting and suggests that I and the people I talk to about such things are unusual. Do you mean people don't extrapolate from the inaccuracy of such reports, or to they find them to be not too inaccurate?
The people I have in mind say something along the lines of "But the newspaper reports are the only information we have, therefore we have no choice but to believe them".