Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that while men regret not seizing the opportunity for a quick and meaningless tryst, women are more regretful of jumping into a man’s bed for just a one-night stand. According to a UCLA professor, this stark difference in regret types can be explained by evolutionary pressures that fall above both genders.
“For men, throughout evolutionary history, every missed opportunity to have sex with a new partner was potentially a missed reproductive opportunity – a costly loss from an evolutionary perspective,” said Martie Haselton, a UCLA professor of psychology and communication studies in whose lab the research was conducted. “But for women, reproduction required much more investment in each offspring, including nine months of pregnancy and potentially two additional years of breastfeeding. The consequences of casual sex were so much higher for ancestral women than for ancestral men, and this is likely to have shaped emotional reactions to sexual liaisons even today.”
“These findings are consistent with the notion that the psychology of sexual regret was shaped by recurrent sex differences in selection pressures operating over deep time,” said co-author David Buss, a University of Texas at Austin evolutionary psychologist.
The research was conducted across three studies that involved questioning over 24,000 individuals about their sexual regrets. In the first study, participants were asked to evaluate hypothetical scenarios in which someone regretted taking advantage of or failing to take advantage of an opportunity to have sex. The participants were then asked to rate the how the main character in the scenarios felt on a scale of one to five.
In the next study, heterosexual participants were given a list of sexual regrets and asked to identify the ones they had experienced themselves. The third and final study was a replica of the second one except this time lesbians, gays and bisexual participants were also included.
Researchers found that among women 24 percent were most regretful about losing their virginity to the wrong person, 22 percent were most regretful about cheating on the current partner and 20 percent were worried about moving too fast sexually in a relationship.
Among men, 27 percent were most regretful about being too shy to make a move on a sexual prospect, 23 percent were most regretful about not being sexually adventurous enough while they were young and 19 percent were most regretful about not being more sexually adventurous when they were single. Only 10 percent of men compared to 17 percent of women admitted being most remorseful about having sex with an unattractive person.
Researchers noted that while the percent of people engaging in casual sex was similar across both genders, women had more intense regrets about it than men. The findings were similar among gay men and lesbian women, and bisexual men and bisexual women, as reported in Dailymail.
“We do not doubt that social norms, such as a sexual ‘double standard,’ play a major role in sexual regret,” said lead author Andrew Galperin, who worked on the project before completing his Ph.D. in psychology at UCLA in 2012. “But these norms themselves might have roots in the ancient selection pressures shaping women’s and men’s minds.”
“One thing that is fascinating about these emotional reactions in the present is that they are often far removed from the reproductive consequences of the ancestral past,” Haselton said. “For example, we have reliable methods of contraception. But that doesn’t seem to have erased the sex differences in women’s and men’s responses, which have a deep evolutionary history.”
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