Sexual morality: Multidimensionality and sex differences.

Abstract

Despite the increase in the scientific study of morality over the past decade, one important domain remains relatively underexplored—sexual morality. The current article begins to fill this gap by exploring its multidimensionality and testing several evolution-based hypotheses about sex differences in moralizing distinct components of sexual morality, including incest, sexual coercion, sexual infidelity, and short-term mating. Study 1 (N = 920) and Study 2 (N = 543) tested predictions derived from evolutionary psychological hypotheses and used factor analysis to identify seven core factors of sexual morality separately for male and female actors: infidelity, short-term sex, sexual coercion, outgroup sex, long-term mating, same-sex sexuality, and paraphilic sex. Study 3 (N = 380) provided an independent test of the evolution-based hypotheses and factor structure. Results strongly support sex-differentiated predictions about short-term sex, but not sexual coercion or incest (possibly owing to ceiling effects). Discussion centers around sexual morality as a complex domain not readily explained by more domain-general theories of morality and the necessity of comprehensive theories of morality to include sex-differentiated components in their formulations.