WHY MEN STRAY
Studies suggest women are better at resisting temptation
RESEARCH suggests they experience a more intense form of desire than their female counterparts. And divorce attorneys and stand-up comedians agree: guys have a harder time resisting sexual temptation.
Studies suggest married men are more likely than women to have extramarital affairs, as well as to seduce someone else’s partner.
But why do they engage in such behaviour, which is often self-destructive and almost always hurtful to those they love?
New research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides a possible answer. It suggests men’s ability to resist temptation is no stronger or weaker than that of the ladies. But it gets overridden more often because of the intensity of men’s desire.
In two studies, “men succumbed to sexual temptations more than women”, report Natasha Tidwell of Texas A&M University and Paul Eastwick of the University of Texas-Austin.
“This sex difference emerged because men experienced stronger impulses, not because they exerted less intentional control.”
The ability to use self-control is relatively new, perhaps dating back no more than 50 000 years
The first study featured 218 Americans — 70 men and 148 women — recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Their average age was 32. All were instructed to describe a time when “you were attracted to someone who you felt it was wrong to pursue”.
They then answered a series of questions about the affair (or wouldbe affair), including the strength of the desire they experienced, whether they did everything they could to resist the temptation and whether they ultimately acted on the impulse.
According to these reports, “men were more likely to succumb to the sexual temptation, and this sex difference . . . was a function of impulse strength. Men and women did not differ in their intentional control attempts.” The men just failed more often.
The second study featured 600 undergraduates (326 men and 274 women). They performed a “partner selection game” sitting in front of a computer. Photos of attractive or less attractive potential mates flashed on the screen in rapid succession, along with a prompt by the computer that the person pictured was “good for you” or “bad for you”.
Participants were instructed to accept the “good” partners (as determined by the computer) by pulling a joystick towards themselves and to reject “bad” partners by pushing the joystick away. Researchers noted when they pushed it in the wrong direction or hesitated too long before making their choice.
They found men performed more poorly than women in the game, largely because they “experienced a much stronger impulse to ‘accept’ the desirable [that is, physically attractive] partners than the undesirable partners”. The difference “was much smaller for women”.
Men performed worse than women “because they experienced a strong impulse to respond ‘ yes’ to the desirable opposite sex targets, not because they failed to exert intentional control over their responses”, said the researchers.
This all makes sense from an evolutionary psychological perspective, according to Tidwell and Eastwick. After all, they noted, “brief, low-investment sexual encounters could have resulted in greater reproductive success for men than for women in humans’ evolutionary past”.
Although that urge goes back to our beginnings as a species, the ability to use self-control is relatively new, perhaps dating back no more than 50 000 years.
If so, it is not surprising that it is sometimes overridden by the deepseated desire to mate with anyone who strikes a man’s fancy.
Perhaps in another 50 000 years the self-control impulse will strengthen to the point at which it can override the I-want-her impulse. That is little solace to a woman whose mate is straying. This research does not give him a licence to do so, but it does suggest that it is not a simple matter of trying hard to resist. He may be doing just that — and failing. — salon.com