- For the study, 751 college students provided information about their past sexual experience and their views on casual sex. They read a near-identical vignette about a male or female peer, with the only difference being the character’s number of lifetime sexual partners (two or 20). Researchers asked them to rate the person on a range of friendship factors, including warmth, competence, morality, emotional stability and overall likability.
Across all female participants, women — regardless of their own promiscuity — viewed sexually permissive women more negatively on nine of ten friendship attributes, judging them more favorably only on their outgoingness. Permissive men only identified two measures, mate guarding and dislike of sexuality, where they favored less sexually active men as friends, showing no preference or favoring the more promiscuous men on the eight other variables; even more sexually modest men preferred the non-permissive potential friend in only half of all variables.
- On the one hand, there is a very well-established finding in sociology and psychology that people become friends and lovers with those similar to them in all sorts of characteristics (demographics, intelligence, attitudes, etc.) — called homophily. So based on the homophily principle, we expected that promiscuous people might like other promiscuous people as friends.
On the other hand, promiscuity is not the same as say, age or intelligence. There are social and evolutionary benefits to not being friends with a promiscuous person even if you are promiscuous yourself. Prior research shows that promiscuous people are more likely to cheat on their partners or “poach” other people’s mates, so a promiscuous same-sex friend poses an evolutionary threat to your own romantic relationship (and this threat should affect promiscuous and non-promiscuous people similarly)
- I [Zhana Vrangalova] analyzed that data a few weeks ago and more promiscuous women (and men) do not appear to be any more isolated or lonely, which is really interesting and requires further research into why and how they manage to maintain friendships and sense of connectedness despite being rejected from females as friends and from men as long-term partners (which other studies have showed).
Discuss.
