SATURDAY, AUG 31, 2013 11:30 AM EDT

Why men are more likely to cheat

Research suggests they experience a more intense
form of desire than their female counterparts
TOM JACOBS,

PACIFIC STANDARD

Research suggests they experience a more intense form of desire than their female counterparts
TOM JACOBS, PACIFIC STANDARD
This piece originally appeared on Pacific Standard.
Pacific Standard Researchers, 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 elses partner.
But why, exactly, do they engage in such behaviorwhich 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 mens 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 mens 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, and this sex difference
emerged because men experienced stronger impulses, not because they exerted less intentional
control.
The first study featured 218 Americans70 men, 148 womenrecruited through Amazons 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 would-be 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 self-reports, Men were more likely to succumb to the sexual temptation, and this
sex difference was a function of impulse strength, the researchers write. 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, 274 women). They performed a partner
selection game while sitting in front of a computer. Photos of attractive or less-attractive potential
mates flashed onto the screen in rapid succession, along with a prompt from the computer than 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 toward themselves, and 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 on the game, largely because they experienced a
much stronger impulse to accept the desirable (that is, physically attractive) partners rather than the
undesirable partners. This difference was much smaller for women, they add.
To put it another way: Men performed worse than women because they experienced a strong impulse
to respond yes to the desirable opposite-sex targets, the researchers write, not because they failed
to exert intentional control over their responses.
This all makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective, according to Tidwell and Eastwick.
After all, they note, brief, low-investment sexual encounters could have resulted in greater
reproductive success for men than for women in humans evolutionary past.
But while that urge goes back to our beginnings of a species, the ability to use self-control is relatively
new, perhaps dating back no more than 50,000 years. If so, its not surprising that it is sometimes
overridden by the deep-seeded desire to mate with anyone who strikes a mans fancy.
Perhaps in another 50,000 years, the self-control impulse in men will strengthen to the point where it
can override the I-want-her impulse. But of course, that provides little solace to a woman whose mate is
straying. This research doesnt give him license to do so, but it does suggest that its not a simple matter
of trying hard to resist. He may very well be doing just thatand failing.