Other People's Sex Lives Are Not What You Think
Research shows that we think teens are having more sex than they actually are. Men, in particular, have a distorted understanding of young women's sex lives.
The results of research conducted by the research and consultancy company Ipsos on misperceptions were collected in the book The Perils of Perception.
Within the scope of the research, people living in the UK and the USA were asked to estimate how much sex the 18-29 age group in their country had in the last month.
The average estimate in both countries centered on young men having sex 14 times a month. However, detailed studies on sexual behavior showed that the real number was five in the UK and four in the USA.
So while people think young men have sex every other day or 180 times a year, the real number is around 50 times a year.
But this is not the only mistake in our predictions. In both countries, men have greater misconceptions about the sex lives of young women.
Because men in England estimated that these women had sex 22 times a month, and those in the USA estimated 23 times. However, research shows that young women have sex on average five times a month.
One of the reasons underlying this misconception is our way of thinking and the other is the information conveyed to us on this subject.
Benchmarking Problem
Everyone knows that the continuation of our lineage depends on sex. But our perceptions on this subject contain many mistakes. Because while we can have a better idea about social norms regarding other human behavior through observation, the same does not apply to sex that takes place behind closed doors. Sex acts that everyone can watch are not the kind that accurately represent real norms.
Since we cannot access accurate information that we can compare with real life, we turn to other sources, men's chats, dubious surveys, obscene media and porn. These distort our perception of reality because they contain extreme examples and questionable anecdotes.
Number of Sexual Partners
In the same study, people from three countries were asked to estimate the number of sexual partners that people aged 45 to 54 had ever had. For men, these predictions were very close to reality.
According to the self-report of men in Australia and England, they had reached an average of 17 sexual partners by the age of 45-54, and 19 in the USA, and the predictions on this subject were correct.
However, when we compare men and women, we see that the situation is completely different, and the average number of sexual partners reported by women is much less than men estimate.
According to women's own statements, the average number of sexual partners is half the number of sexual partners of men. But here a statistical impasse emerges. Because these numbers must match each other.
Reasons for this may include factors such as men resorting to paid sex and men and women evaluating some sexual practices differently.
However, the biggest factor in the emergence of this difference is that men tend to consciously or unconsciously inflate the figure, while women, on the contrary, tend to reduce this figure.
Prejudices About Women
Data obtained in the USA also showed that there was a large difference between men and women in the estimates made on women. While men estimated women's number of sexual partners at 27, women thought this number was 13, which was very close to the actual average of 12.
In the sample group of 1000 people, about 20 American men estimated the number of sexual partners of women as 50, causing the overall average to rise.
These misjudgments reveal a lot about how we see the world. It offers serious clues about our deep-seated biases, as we make our assumptions about what is 'normal' automatically, without thinking.
The predictions in this research point to the existence of misconceptions about young people and women, especially among a small segment of men.
Like other misperceptions, what needs to be done here is not to pump out data to correct these misconceptions, but to address their underlying causes.
