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<< Why "Tax Cut Stimulus" Fails | Main | Military Family Blames Bush for Deaths >> July 15, 2003Sex and StatisticsOne thing to remember about surveys is that odd or strange results often can be explained by a simple answer: people lied. A long-time question has been how to explain the fact that men report having far more sexual partners than women, since it raises the question of who the men are having sex with. The conventional answer has been that men are likely inflating their number of partners, but a new study suggests that it is women who systematically downplay the number of their partners. The study showed that women answering a conventional survey report far fewer partners than women who think they are rigged up to a lie detecter. Men, however, give roughly the same answer in either instance. It's a fun result culturally, but it's also a good reminder that poll answers are heavily shaped by expectations of what a person thinks the pollster will approve. Even if the results are generally anonymous, people are embarassed if even one person, the pollster, hears them admit something seemingly shameful. So if an answer to a question in a poll has a shameful possibility, always assume that number is undercounted. Posted by Nathan at July 15, 2003 06:49 PM Related posts:
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsI've always chalked it up to a lot of guys sleeping with the same woman... Posted by: Zonker at July 16, 2003 02:12 AM But Zonker, if 20 men all sleep with two women and 18 other women have no sex, that means that the men have an average of two partners and the women have an average of, yes, two partners. (It averages out between the women having lots of sex and those having none). Which is where the fun of popular statistics comes in. A lot of people had your sense of how things work, but it just doesn't work mathematically. Which is why the study was so much fun in messing with that conventional explanation. Posted by: Nathan Newman at July 16, 2003 04:17 PM Zonker: I've met that woman. She's very nice. If you read about the "Sex in America" study (which I think is the original source of the figure), then it has to be women who are lying down: they ask lots of details which would be hard to manufacture on the spot. It's much easier to edit somebody out. There was this woman who I knew pretty well, and we were talking about how many people we had slept with. She said two. I already knew of more than two, so asked her what she was talking about. It turned out that she had some complicated definition of "sleeping with", so that, for example, a one-night stand didn't count. By a man's definition, she had slept with 13 people. There is another possible explanation though, and I have never heard the figures stated clearly enough to rule it out: that the total number of sex partners for men included other men. Posted by: Walt Pohl at July 17, 2003 10:22 AM Which, in another context, is why Colin Powell was smart not to run for President: enough of those people who swear they'd vote for the right Black candidate are lying. And although I can't remember where, I saw a recent poll saying some huge number of Americans would have no problem voting for a gay Presidential candidate. They're lying too. Posted by: DonBoy at July 18, 2003 09:40 PM Post a comment
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