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2018-08-16 08:09:01
We imagine that other people are having much more sex than we are. The reasons
why are hardwired into our animal instincts and fuelled by some unconscious
biases.
By Bobby Duffy From The Conversation
15 August 2018
Research shows we think young people have a lot more sex than they do in
reality and men have a particularly skewed view of the sex lives of young
women.
As part of Ipsos long-running studies on misperceptions to be released in a
new book, The Perils of Perception, we asked people in Britain and the US to
guess how often people aged 18-29 in their country had sex in the past four
weeks.
The average guess about young men in both countries is that they had sex 14
times in the last month. But the actual number is just five in Britain and four
in the US, according to detailed surveys of sexual behaviour.
Our guess would mean that, on average, young men are having sex every other day
around 180 times a year compared with the more mundane reality of around 50
times. But that s not the most remarkable error in our guessing. Men are even
more wildly wrong when they guess about young women s sex lives, in both the US
and Britain.
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Men think young women are having an incredible amount of sex 22 times a month
in Britain, and 23 times a month in the US. These guesses would be the
equivalent of the average young woman having sex every weekday, plus two or
three times on one special day each month. In reality, it s around five times.
As with so many of our misperceptions, the explanations for this will be both
how we think and what we re told.
The survival of our species literally depends on sex yet it is a hotbed of
misperceptions
The survival of our species literally depends on sex. Yet it is a hotbed of
misperceptions. Unlike many other core human behaviours, where we can get a
better idea of social norms from observation, sex mostly happens behind firmly
closed doors (and the sex that is available for general viewing is not a fully
accurate representation of the norm).
Person pressing Tinder app button (Credit: Alamy)
The rise of dating apps like Tinder may make us think other people's sex lives
are much more colourful (Credit: Alamy)
Because we don t have access to very much real-life comparative information, we
turn to other authoritative' sources: playground or locker room chat, dubious
surveys, salacious media coverage and porn. These provide extreme examples and
dodgy anecdotes that distort our views of reality.
In the same survey, we asked people in three countries to guess how many sexual
partners people in their country have had by the time they get to 45-54 years
of age. On this, people are actually very accurate at guessing the average
number of partners reported by men.
The actual figure in Australia and Britain is an average of 17 partners by the
time men reach 45 54. In the US, it s 19. The average guesses are almost
spot-on.
Women claim to have had almost half the number of sexual partners as men
But it gets much more interesting when we compare men and women. First, the
standout pattern is with the actual data. The number of partners claimed by
women in surveys of sexual behaviour is much, much lower than the number
claimed by men.
In fact, women claim to have had almost half the number of sexual partners as
men. This is one of the great conundrums of sexual behaviour measurement: it s
seen again and again in high-quality sex surveys, but it s a statistical
impossibility.
Given that both men and women are reporting pairings, and they make up roughly
equal proportions of the (heterosexual) population, the numbers should roughly
match.
Woman on phone in bar (Credit: Alamy)
American men thought American women had had twice as many partners as the real
average (Credit: Alamy)
There are a number of suggested explanations for this everything from men s
use of prostitutes to how the different genders interpret the question (for
example, if women discount some sexual practices that men count).
But it seems most likely to be a mix of men s tendency to be more rough and
ready when they add up combined with men s conscious or unconscious bumping up
of their figure, and women s tendency to deflate theirs.
There is evidence of the latter effect from a US study among students which
split the participants into three groups before asking them about their sexual
behaviour. One group of women was left alone to fill out the questionnaire as
normal. Another was led to believe that their answers could be seen by someone
supervising the experiment. And the third was attached to a fake lie detector
machine.
These guesses point to some frighteningly wrong views of young people and
women, particularly among a small section of men
The group of women who thought their answers may be seen claimed an average of
2.6 sexual partners, the standard anonymous questionnaire group said 3.4 on
average, while those attached to the useless beeping machine said 4.4 which
was in line with the men in the study.
There is one final worrying twist in the US data. Men and women guess very
differently for women in the US. American men think that American women have
had 27 partners on average, but American women guess only 13, which is much
closer to the figure women claim for themselves of 12.
Polygraph (Credit: Alamy)
In one study, women wired up to a fake lie detector wrote down a much higher
number of sexual partners (Credit: Alamy)
This ludicrously high average guess among men for US women is largely due to a
small number of US men who think that US women have an incredible number of
partners. In fact, there were around 20 US men in our sample of 1,000 that went
for numbers of 50 or (sometimes way) above, and that skews the data.
Our misperceptions reveal a lot about how we see the world. They are a
brilliant clue to our deep-seated biases, as our guesses at what is normal
are more automatic and unguarded. In this study, these guesses point to some
frighteningly wrong views of young people and women, particularly among a small
section of men.
As with other misperceptions, the answer is not just to bombard people with
more facts to correct these views, but to also deal with the underlying causes
that what we re told and how we think leads many of us to get so much so
wrong.