When a man is thinking about sex, does it make him more likely to lie? New research seems to indicate that’s the case.
The research on sex and lying
A new study from the University of Rochester and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya has found that when we have sex on our minds, we are more likely to stretch the truth in order to be more appealing to our potential partners. It’s not necessarily conscious though.
The research included four sets of experience, all with heterosexual men and women between the ages of 21 and 32.
Experiment No. 1
Volunteers were split into two groups. One group went through “sexual priming” (getting them to think about things in a sexual way by activating certain parts of the brain), although that didn’t mean they were getting genitally aroused, necessarily. The males and females had to solve a dilemma for a fictitious character before being paired with the opposite sex. Each person in the pair was asked to argue a different point of view. The researchers discovered that the participants who were sexually primed beforehand were more likely to agree with their partner’s argument than those who hadn’t been sexually primed.
Experiment No. 2
The men and women were asked about their sexual, dating and relationship preferences and then subliminally exposed to either neutral or sexual stimuli. The participants were then told to chat with peer participants online. In reality, they were paired with attractive researchers of the opposite sex. When asked to view their chat partner’s dating preferences and then fill out their own dating profile again, the participants who had been exposed to sexual stimuli were more likely to alter their own preferences in order to have them appear more matched with their chat partner.
Experiment No. 3 and 4
The team found that sexually primed male and female participants were more likely to lie about how many sexual partners they had during a chat with an attractive member of the opposite sex. The theory is that by lying and saying they had fewer sexual partners, the participants were subconsciously attempting to be more attractive to potential partners.
