Previous research has shown that men are more likely than women to pursue romantic partners that are \u201coff limits.\u201d<\/strong> However, until now, the explanation for this sex difference was largely unexplored.<\/p>\n One possible explanation for this effect is that men experience stronger sexual impulses than women do. A second possibility is that women have better self-control than men<\/strong>. The current study\u2019s results support the former explanation and provide new insight into humans’ evolutionary origins.<\/p>\n \u201cOverall, these studies suggest that men are more likely to give in to sexual temptations because they tend to have stronger sexual impulse strength than women do<\/strong>,\u201d says Natasha Tidwell, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University, who authored the study.\u00a0Paul Eastwick, assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, co-authored the study.<\/p>\n \u201cBut when people exercise self-control in a given situation, this sex difference in behavior is greatly reduced. It makes sense that self-control, which has relatively recent evolutionary origins compared to sexual impulses, would work similarly \u2014 and as effectively \u2014 for both men and women<\/strong>,\u201d Tidwell said.<\/p>\n Recently published in\u00a0Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin<\/em>, the\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0was composed of two separate experiments: the first, to determine how the sexes reacted to real-life sexual temptations in their past and, the second, to pick apart sexual impulses and self-control using a rapid-fire reaction time task.<\/p>\n In order to test their first hypothesis, researchers recruited 218 (70 male, 148 female) study participants from the United States.<\/strong><\/p>\n Participants were first asked to recall and describe an attraction to an unavailable or incompatible member of the opposite sex. They then answered survey questions designed to measure strength of sexual impulse, attempts to intentionally control the sexual impulse, and resultant behaviors.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen men reflected on their past sexual behavior, they reported experiencing relatively stronger impulses and acting on those impulses more than women did,\u201d says Tidwell.<\/p>\n However, men and women did not differ in the extent to which they exerted self-control<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen men and women said they actually did exert self-control in sexual situations, impulse strength didn\u2019t predict how much either sex would actually engage in \u2018off-limits\u2019 sex,\u201d added Tidwell.<\/p>\n \u201cMen have plenty of self-control \u2014 just as much as women,\u201d says Eastwick. \u201cHowever, if men fail to use self-control, their sexual impulses can be quite strong<\/strong>. This is often the situation when cheating occurs.\u201d<\/p>\n In order to measure the strength of sexual impulse relative to the strength of impulse control, the researchers recruited 600 undergraduate students (326 men, 274 women) to participate in a \u201cPartner Selection Game.\u201d<\/p>\n Participants were very briefly shown images of opposite-sex individuals; the images were tagged either \u201cgood for you\u201d or \u201cbad for you.\u201d<\/strong> Participants were asked to accept or reject potential partners based on the computer-generated \u201cgood for you\u201d or \u201cbad for you\u201d prompt.<\/p>\n While they were shown photographs of both desirable and undesirable individuals, participants were instructed to make acceptance and rejection choices based on the computer-generated tags. In some trials, participants were asked to accept desirable and reject undesirable individuals<\/strong>; in other trials, participants were asked to go against their inclinations by rejecting desirable individuals and accepting undesirable individuals.<\/p>\n Men experienced a much stronger impulse to \u201caccept\u201d the desirable rather than the undesirable partners, and this impulse partially explained why men performed worse on the task than women did. However, this same procedure estimates people\u2019s ability to exert control over their responses, and men did not demonstrate a poorer ability to control their responses relative to women.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University of Texas media release: A recently published study strongly suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women \u2014 for example, cheating on a partner \u2014 because… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,340,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15635,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15627\/revisions\/15635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"couple](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/couple-jealousy.jpg\")
<\/a>A recently published study strongly suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women \u2014 for example, cheating on a partner<\/strong> \u2014 because they experience strong sexual impulses, not because they have weak self-control.<\/p>\n