Are Men Really more Sexual than Women?
Heterosexual men report more partners than heterosexual women. That doesn't add up.
One of the long-standing mysteries of human sexuality research has been that heterosexual men tend to report having more sexual encounters and partners than heterosexual women — a mathematical impossibility. This has generally been chalked up to men’s tendency to exaggerate upward and women’s to exaggerate downward in recalling such information.
Psychologists Terri Fisher and Michele Alexander wanted to investigate what external factors could influence how people answered these sorts of questions. So they asked people about their sexual behavior: age of their first sexual experience, how many partners they’d had, and frequency of sexual encounters, use of porn, etc. But rather than just asking, Fisher and Alexander set up three different testing conditions:
Subjects were led to believe their answers might be seen by the researchers, who waited just outside the room.
Subjects answered the questions completely privately and anonymously.
The subjects had electrodes placed on their hand, arm, and neck — believing themselves (falsely) to be hooked up to a polygraph that would detect any lies.
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