The desire for sexual variety as a key to understanding basic human matingstrategies

Different authors have proposed competing evolutionary theories of human ma ting. Some argue that both sexes are designed to pursue a singular long-ter m mating strategy. Others contend that both sexes are designed to function as essentially multiple maters. Sexual Strategies Theory (SST, D.M. Buss & D.P. Schmitt, 1993), in contrast, proposes that men and women have evolved short-term and long-term mating strategies that are pursued differently by each sex depending on theoretically derived dimensions of context. Accordin g to SST, the sexes tend to differ in the nature and prominence of the shor t-term component of human mating-particularly the short-term desire for sex ual variety. The current research was designed to test competing empirical predictions from these contrasting theories by focusing on sex differences in the desire for sexual variety. Study 1 (N = 1,049), consisting of five s eparate samples, found large and consistent sex differences in the desire f or short-term sexual variety, even after employing statistical methods to c ontrol for skewed distributions and statistical outliers. Study 2 (N = 192) confirmed the results of Study 1 using an older, more mature sample. Study 3 (N = 50) again replicated these sex differences using an observer-based method of inquiry. Study 4 (N = 167) found evidence that short-term mating was unrelated generally to psychological dysfunction and may be related to mentally healthy personality characteristics in men. Discussion focuses on the viability of pluralistic compared with monomorphic evolutionary theorie s of human mating strategies.