Month: April 2015

Men just want sex more than women. I’m sure you’ve heard that one. Stephen Fry even went as far as suggesting in 2010 that straight women only went to bed with men because sex was “the price they are willing to pay for a relationship”.

Or perhaps you’ve even heard some of the evidence. In 1978 two psychologists, Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, did what became a famous experiment on the topic – not least because it demonstrated how much fun you can have as a social psychologist. Using volunteers, Clark and Hatfield had students at Florida State University approach people on campus and deliver a pick-up line.

The volunteers always began the same “I’ve noticed you around campus. I find you to be very attractive”, they said. They varied what they said next according to one of three randomly chosen options. Either “would you go out tonight?”, or “will you come over to my apartment?”, or “would you go to bed with me?” (if these phrases sound familiar, it may be because they form the chorus of Touch and Go’s 1990s Jazz-pop hit “Would You Go To Bed With Me” – probably the only pop song whose lyrics are lifted entirely from the methods section of a research paper).

In Clark and Hatfield’s research, both men and women were approached (always by volunteers of the opposite sex). The crucial measure was whether they said yes or no. And you can probably guess the results: although men and women were equally likely to accept the offer of a date (about half said yes and half said no), the two sexes differed dramatically in how they responded to the offer of casual sex. None of the women approached took up the offer of sex with a complete stranger. Three-quarters of the men did (yes, more than were willing to just go on a date with a complete stranger).

A matter of interpretation

But since this experiment, controversy has raged about how it should be interpreted. One school of thought is that men and women make different choices because of different sex drives, sex drives which are different for deeply seated biological reasons to do with the logic of evolution. Because, this logic goes, there is a hard limit on how many children a women can have she should be focused on quality in her sexual partners – she wants them to invest in parenting, or at the very least make a high-grade genetic contribution. If she has a child with the wrong partner, she uses up one of a very limited number of opportunities to reproduce. So she should be choosy.

A man on the other hand, shouldn’t be so concerned about quality. There’s no real limit on the number of children he can have, if he has them with different women, so he should grab every sexual opportunity he can, regardless of the partner. The costs are low, there are only benefits.

This evolutionary logic, relentlessly focused as it is on reproduction and survival, does provide a consistent explanation for the differences Clark and Hatfield observed, but it isn’t the only explanation.

The problem is that the participants in this experiment aren’t abstract representatives of all human men and women. They are particular men and women from a particular place and time, who exist in a particular social context – university students in American society at the end of the 20th century. And our society treats men and women very differently. So how about this alternate take: maybe men and women’s sex drives are pretty similar, but the experiment just measures behaviour which is as shaped by society as much as biology.

Taking out the social factor

This month, new research published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, gives a vital handle on the question of whether women really don’t want sex as much as men do.

Two German researchers, Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, replicated the original Clark and Hatfield study, but with some vital changes. First they showed that the original result still held, even among German university students in the 21st century – and they showed that it still held if you asked people in a nightclub rather than on campus. But the pair reasoned that one factor in how women respond to invitations to sex may be fear – fear of reputational damage in a culture which judges women’s sexual activity differently from men’s, and fear of physical harm from an encounter with a male stranger. They cite one study which found that 45% of US women have experienced sexual violence of some kind.

So, in order to find out if women in these experiments were held back by fear, they designed an elaborate cover scenario designed to make the participants believe they could accept offers of sex without fear of anyone finding out, or of physical danger. Participants were invited into a lab under the ruse that they would be helping a dating company evaluate their compatibility rating algorithm. They were presented with ten pictures of members of the opposite sex and led to believe that all ten had already agreed to meet up with them (either for a date, or for sex). With these, and a few other convincing details, the experimenters hoped that participants would reveal their true attitudes to dating, or hooking up for sex with, total strangers, unimpeded by fear of what might happen to them if they said yes.

The results were dramatic. Now there was no difference between the dating and the casual sex scenarios, large proportions of both men and women leap at the chance to meet up with a stranger with the potential for sex – 100% of the men and 97% of the women in the study chose to meet up for a date or sex with at least one partner. The women who thought they had the chance to meet up with men for sex, chose an average of slightly less than three men who they would like to have an encounter with. The men chose an average of slightly more than three women who they would like to have an encounter with.

Men are from Earth – and so are women

The study strongly suggests that the image of women as sexually choosy and conservative needs some dramatic qualification. In the right experimental circumstances, women’s drive for casual sex looks similar to men’s. Previous experiments had leapt to a conclusion about biology, when they’d actually done experiments on behaviour which is part-determined by society. It’s an important general lesson for anyone who wants to draw conclusions about gender differences, in whatever area of behaviour.

There was still a gender difference in this new experiment – men chose more partners out of ten to meet up with, but still we can’t say that the effect of our culture was washed out. All the people in the experiment were brought up to expect different attitudes to their sexual behaviour based on their gender and to expect different risks of saying yes to sexual encounters (or of saying yes and then changing their minds).

Even with something as biological as sex, when studying human nature it isn’t easy to separate out the effect of society on how we think, feel and act. This new study gives an important update to an old research story which too many have interpreted as saying something about unalterable differences between men and women. The real moral may be about the importance of completely alterable differences in the way society treats men and women.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

It stings when life’s not fair – but what happens if it means we profit? As Tom Stafford writes, some people may perform unexpected self-sabotage.

Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behaviour at Emory University, is the unlikely star of a viral video. His academic’s physique, grey jumper and glasses aren’t the usual stuff of a YouTube sensation. But de Waal’s research with monkeys, and its implications for human nature, caught the imagination of millions of people.

It began with a TED talk in which de Waal showed the results of one experiment that involved paying two monkeys unequally (see video, below). Capuchin monkeys that lived together were taken to neighbouring cages and trained to hand over small stones in return for food rewards. The researchers found that a typical monkey would happily hand over stone after stone when it was rewarded for each exchange with a slice of cucumber.

But capuchin monkeys prefer grapes to cucumber slices. If the researchers paid one of the monkeys in grapes instead, the monkey in the neighbouring cage – previously happy to work for cucumber – became agitated and refused to accept payment in cucumber slices. What had once been acceptable soon became unacceptable when it was clear a neighbour was getting a better reward for the same effort.

The highlight of the video is when the poorly paid monkey throws the cucumber back at the lab assistant trying to offer it as a reward.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that humans can feel very much like the poorly paid monkey. Injustice stings. These results and others like them, argues de Waal, show that moral sentiments are part of our biological inheritance, a consequence of an ancestral life that was dominated by egalitarian group living – and the need for harmony between members of the group.

That’s a theory, and de Waal’s result definitely shows that our evolutionary cousins, the monkeys, are strongly influenced by social comparisons. But the experiment doesn’t really provide strong evidence that monkeys want justice. The underpaid monkey gets angry, but we’ve no evidence that the better-paid monkey is unhappy about the situation. In humans, by comparison, we can find stronger evidence that an instinct for fairness can lurk inside the psyche of even the most competitive of us.

The players in the National Basketball Association in the USA rank as some of the highest earning sportspeople in the world. In the 2007-08 season the best paid of them received salaries in excess of $20 million (£13.5 million), and more than 50 members of the league had salaries of $10 million (£6.7 million) or more.

The 2007-08 season is interesting because that is when psychologists Graeme Haynes and Thomas Gilovich reviewed recordings of more than 100 NBA games, looking for occasions that fouls were called by the referees when it was clear to the players that no foul had actually been committed. Whenever a foul is called, the wronged player gets a number of free throws – chances to score points for their team. Haynes and Gilovich were interested in how these ultra-competitive, highly paid sportsmen reacted to being awarded free throws when they knew that they didn’t really deserve them.

Missed shot

These guys had every incentive to make the most of the free throws, however unfairly gained: after all, they make their living from winning, and the points gained from free throws could settle a match. Yet Haynes and Gilovich found that players’ accuracy from unfairly awarded free throws was unusually low. It was down compared to the free throw league average, and down compared to the individual players’ free throw personal averages. Accuracy on unfairly awarded free throws was lowest when the player’s team was ahead and didn’t need the points so much. But tellingly, it was also lower than average when the team was behind and in need of points – whether honestly or dishonestly gained.

If players in one of the most competitive and best-paid sports can apparently be put off by guilt, it suggests to me that an instinct for fairness can survive even the most ruthless environments.

At the end of the monkey clip, de Waal jokes that the behaviour parallels the way people have staged protests against Wall Street, and the greed they see there. And he’s right that our discomfort with unequal pay may be as deeply set as the monkey’s.

Yet perhaps these feelings run even deeper. The analysis of the basketball players suggests that when we stand to benefit from injustices – even if they can help justify multi-million dollar salaries – some part of us is uncomfortable with the situation, and may even work to undermine that advantage.

So don’t give up on the bankers and the multi-millionaire athletes just yet.

This is my latest column for BBC Future. The original is here.