Receptivity to casual sexual requests

ABSTRACT

Research has long noted that there are differences between men’s and women’s responses to casual sexual requests. In this study, we sought to replicate and extend the Clark and Hatfield paradigm while exploring the influence of requestor attractiveness, sexual orientation, and two individual difference measures: sociosexuality (which is how open to sexuality a person is) and personal mate value (which is how high quality of a mate the person is). We found that attractiveness matters in the likelihood of a request being accepted (the more attractive the requester, the higher the proportion of agreement); sexual orientation matters for the overall proportion of responses agreed to (heterosexuals were most impacted by the attractiveness of the target), and that sociosexuality moderates the likelihood of agreeing to the requests (such that participants with higher sociosexuality scores were more likely to agree to requests).

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual orientation
• casual sex
• sociosexuality
• mate value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at http://osf.io/b42nz

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at http://osf.io/b42nz

Notes

1. The large number of bisexuals in this sample was unexpected and we have no particular explanation to offer. This study was advertised a study looking at personality and relationships (which should have no impact on recruitment).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology.