In a study typical of this research, Buss and his colleagues asked 1,122 people to imagine their partner becoming interested in someone else. They asked, “What would upset or distress you more: (a) imagining your partner forming a deep emotional (but not sexual) relationship with that person, or (b) imagining your partner enjoying a sexual (but not emotional) relationship with that person?” In studies like this conducted on college campuses around the United States and Europe, Buss and his colleagues consistently got more-or-less the same results. They found that men and women differed by roughly 35 percent in their responses, seeming to confirm their hypothesis. “Women continued to express greater upset about a partner’s emotional infidelity,” Buss writes, “even if it did not involve sex. Men continued to show more upset than women about a partner’s sexual infidelity, even if it did not involve emotional involvement.”8
But despite the apparent cross-cultural breadth of this research, it lacks methodological depth. Buss and his colleagues succumb to the same temptation that weakens so much sexuality research: reliance on a subject population more convenient than representative. Almost all the participants in these studies were university students. We understand that undergraduate students are low-hanging research fruit—easy for graduate students to locate and motivate (by offering partial course-credit for filling out a questionnaire, for example), but
But Buss is not alone in this distorting focus on undergrads. The majority of research on sexuality is based upon the responses of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old American university students. While one could make a case that a twenty-year-old guy is more or less like a turbocharged fifty-year-old, few would argue that a twenty-year-old woman has much in common with a woman three decades older in terms of her sexuality. Most would agree that a woman’s sexuality changes considerably throughout adulthood.
Another problem with using college students in the sort of multicultural study Buss conducts concerns class distinctions. In underdeveloped countries, university students are likely to be from the upper classes. A wealthy Angolan student may have a lot more in common with a Portuguese undergrad than with someone his or her own age living in the slums of Luanda. Our own field research in Africa suggests that sexual beliefs and behavior differ greatly among social classes and subcultures there—as they do in other parts of the world.9
Beyond the distorting effects of age and class, Buss and his colleagues skip over the crucial fact that every one of their subjects lives in post-agricultural societies characterized by private property, political hierarchies, globalized television, and so on. How can we expect to identify “human universals” without including at least a few foragers, whose thoughts and behaviors have not been shaped by the effects of modern life and whose perspective represents the vast majority of our
species’ experience? As we’ve established, plenty of research on foragers demonstrates important similarities among unrelated societies and dramatic differences from
post-agricultural norms. Swedes and upper-class Nigerians may see themselves as different from one another, but from a forager’s perspective they would seem similar in many ways.
Granted, it is no easy matter to airdrop questionnaires and #2 pencils to foragers in the Upper Amazon
Psychologist Christine Harris has noted that Buss’s
conclusions could easily be nothing more than confirmation
of old news: that “men are more reactive to any form of
sexual stimuli than they are to emotional stimuli [andl are
10
more interested in, or better able to imagine, such stimuli.” The men get more agitated by the sex, in other words, simply because they imagine it more clearly than the women do.
