Evolutionary Psychology 101
David Schmitt (2003) claims to have found a universal sex difference: the desire for sexual variety. Schmitt's data from the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), a project for which he is the Founding Director, collected surveys from over 16,000 people in 52 nations (largely college students). Schmitt concludes that men in all cultures desire to have more sexual partners than women in all cultures.
Schmitt's survey is rooted in two main theories of evolutionary psychology: parental investment theory (Trivers 1972, in Campbell 1972) and its expansion, sexual strategies theory (Buss and Schmitt 1993). Parental investment theory, in short, notes that the sex that invests less in offspring will be less discriminating in choice of mate. Sexual strategies theory proposes different strategies for long-term and short-term mating, with long-term involving a greater investment in time and resources.
The questionnaire for ISDP-2 is available online, but appears to no longer be collecting data. The site is undated.
While I suspect that this may actually be a gender difference, I don't think that the age of the participants, or the self-report issue can be reasonably ignored. However, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I have a huge bias on this, and that I was raised from a child hearing about how appalling evolutionary psychology was. It's hard for me to get past that to see the parts that make sense.
Schmitt's survey is rooted in two main theories of evolutionary psychology: parental investment theory (Trivers 1972, in Campbell 1972) and its expansion, sexual strategies theory (Buss and Schmitt 1993). Parental investment theory, in short, notes that the sex that invests less in offspring will be less discriminating in choice of mate. Sexual strategies theory proposes different strategies for long-term and short-term mating, with long-term involving a greater investment in time and resources.
The questionnaire for ISDP-2 is available online, but appears to no longer be collecting data. The site is undated.
While I suspect that this may actually be a gender difference, I don't think that the age of the participants, or the self-report issue can be reasonably ignored. However, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I have a huge bias on this, and that I was raised from a child hearing about how appalling evolutionary psychology was. It's hard for me to get past that to see the parts that make sense.