Behavior/Humans

What Boosts Human Promiscuity?

Certain personality traits

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

30th of May 2007, 19:36 GMT

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Being an all around stud is not something that has to do with your physical appearance, nice style or sexual stamina, but rather with your social behavior.

A new research sorted the categories predisposed to this: those who are socially dominant and either very friendly or very antagonistic. These types of people boost sexual promiscuity because of different reasons.

Friendly, warm people could share their huge amount of affectivity to the sheets, while antagonistic people could sleep around as a way of

escaping involvement in a monogamous relationship. Displaying a dominant personality turns it easier to approach potential partners, not to mention the increased libido determined by high testosterone levels in these persons (in this case, it seems that it's all about pure sex).

The part with the dominant personality compared to submissive ones has been probed by many approaches, but it was not clear how the persons' level of interpersonal warmth (how closely they interact with the others) got reflected in their sexual activity.

The research was carried on by Patrick Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University, and his wife Charlotte Markey, a psychologist at Rutgers University, on 210 adult subjects. The volunteers were checked for their interpersonal abilities, but they also had to indicate how many people they had engaged with in sexual encounters.

Their responses indeed underlined dominance as a main factor in promiscuity, but people who were either extremely warm or extremely cold toward the rest of the people displayed the same tendency, while those moderately warm were the category with the fewest number of sexual partners. "Antagonistic people might prefer to have multiple sex partners in order to avoid being in a monogamous relationship, out of fear of being poorly treated or being later rejected by a committed partner," the authors noted in their study.

"It's particularly interesting that warm people tend to be promiscuous, because in some ways, it conflicts with the moral thinking that promiscuity is bad. While sleeping with multiple partners certainly carries with it certain health risks, it could be that someone's not doing it to achieve the most pleasure. Someone actually might be doing it as an expression of their warmth to other people," Patrick Markey told LiveScience.

"A warm person might hug lots of people; a warm person might kiss lots of people. Well, maybe a warm person might sleep with lots of people."

TAGS:

human | sex | promiscuity | behavior

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