Thesis Max Alley

Running Head: IMPLICIT SOCIOSEXUALITY
Predicting Explicit and Implicit attitudes of Sociosexuality using the Big-Five Personality
Traits
Empirical Thesis
Max Alley
Bates College

Abstract
The Sociosexual Orientation inventory (Gangestad & Simpson,1991) is a self-report
questionnaire designed to measure individual differences in the tendency to have
casual, uncommitted sexual relationships or monogamous relationships. This
questionnaire assesses explicit ideas about unrestricted sexual experiences. Ideas
about sociosexuality have previously only been observed explicitly, however in this
experiment, a measure was created to determine if implicit ideas about sociosexuality
could be observed implicitly using an Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D.
E. McGhee, & L. K. Schwartz, 1998). The IAT, a reaction time task, measures
differential associations of 2 target concepts with an attribute. In this study, the IAT
attempts to provide a measure of implicit sociosexuality. Certain traits in the Five Factor
Model of personality (Goldberg, 1993) have been shown to predict responses correlated
with sociosexuality (Wright, 1997). Participants completed the IAT, the Revised
Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI-R), and the Big-Five Inventory (BFI) (Srivastava,
1999), to determine superordinate personality traits. Additionally, (I provided evidence
that) convergent validity can be found between the both implicit and explicit measures of
sociosexuality. Certain traits of the the Big-Five Inventory were shown to predict explicit
and implicit sociosexuality with convergence on the two measures of sociosexuality.

Predicting Explicit and Implicit attitudes of Sociosexuality using the Big-Five Personality
Traits
The term sociosexuality was first coined by Alfred Kinsey in his book, Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey, 1948). Sociosexuality refers to individual
differences in the willingness to engage in sexual activity outside of a committed,
monogamous relationship. Research into sociosexuality remained untouched until
Gangestad & Simpson’s development of the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI),
(Simpson, & Gangestad, 1991). The SOI distinguishes between individuals who report
unrestricted sociosexual orientation and restricted sociosexual orientation. Individuals
with a more restricted sociosexual orientation are less willing to engage in casual sex;
they prefer greater love, commitment, and emotional closeness before having sex with
romantic partners. Alternatively, individuals who have a more unrestricted sociosexual
orientation are more willing to have casual sex and are more comfortable engaging in
sex without love, commitment, or closeness.
Later, in 2008, the revised Sociosexual Orientation inventory (SOI-R) was
created (Penke & Asendorpf, 2008) to correct major criticisms to the original model.
Critics believed that the original model viewed sociosexuality as a single dimension,
leading the revised version to focus on three convergent measures of sociosexuality.
The SOI-R today contains 9 items compared to the original SOI, which only contains 5.
Additionally, the scale lacked internal consistency, displayed skewed score distribution,
and contained one question only applicable to participants not in relationships. Today,
the SOI-R is the most widely used model for gauging sociosexuality and is now
available in 25 languages, with the option to use 9-point response scales or 5-point

response scales. In this study I used the SOI-R questionnaire with a 9-point response
scale to accurately assess sociosexuality in the participants.
The SOI-R compiles a score using three major aspects of sociosexuality: past
behavioral experiences, the attitude toward uncommitted sex, and sociosexual desire.
Of the nine questions on the SOI-R, the first three ask participants to recall past
behavioral experiences regarding sexuality forming the behavior facet of sociosexuality.
Questions 4-6 ask participants to gauge how committed they feel they must be to a
partner in order to engage sexually aggregating to form the attitude facet. The final
three ask participants to respond on past scenarios and hypothetical situations
regarding sexual activity with someone they are not in a committed relationship with
comprising the desire facet. Once scores are recorded, a total score of global
sociosexuality is assigned to a participant, representing a preference for unrestricted
sexual relationships or monogamous relationships.
Sociosexuality has been studied extensively and is shown to be highly correlated
with gender and sexual preference differences. First, across many cultures (48 nations),
men have scored higher in sociosexuality (preference for unrestricted sex) than women
(Schmitt, 2005). However, despite this gender distinction, there is very high variability
among men and women in their degree of sociosexuality. Gay men, for example report
being the most unrestricted in sociosexual behavior, followed by bisexual men and then,
heterosexual men (Schmitt, 2007). In fact, both gay men and women report higher
sociosexuality scores than their heterosexual counterparts.
Sociosexuality has been showed to be directly related to mate preference and
mate selection strategies. Collapsing across gender, participants who report being

sexually unrestricted view short-term mates with greater sexual experience as more
desirable (Wiederman & Dubois, 1998). However, this brings up an interesting question
about short-term vs long-term mate preferences. Past research has shown that
unrestricted individuals prefer short-term uncommitted relationships; however, the two
are not mutually exclusive. Individuals may have a preference for long term, committed,
relationships, but allow sex with others outside of the relationship. This is referred to as
polyamory (Manley et al., 2015). Individuals who identify as polyamorous go against the
stereotype of unrestricted individuals preferring short-term commitment to long-term
commitment. Polyamory is often confused with unrestricted sexuality or promiscuity, but
its practitioners form a separate category because they believe in forming short term,
and long term committed relationships, but their definition of commitment often does not
include sexual monogamy.
Preference for commitment has been shown in research regarding sociosexuality
and attraction preferences. Unrestricted individuals have been shown to place higher
emphasis on partners’ physical attractiveness and sex appeal, while restricted
individuals place more weight on characteristics indicative of good personal and
parenting qualities (e.g., kind, responsible, faithful1) (Simpson & Gangestad, 1992).
When unrestricted men and restricted men both viewed attractive female models, the
unrestricted men showed higher interest in the models’ physical attractiveness while
restricted men placed a higher emphasis on social traits (Townsend & Wasserman,
1998). This makes sense, given unrestricted individuals’ preferences for short-term
1 It is important to note that examples used are not exclusively good parenting qualities; these
qualities may also be present in any relationship.

relationships. Unrestricted sociosexuality is also associated with early life experiences
with sex, more frequent sexual activity, and a greater number of lifetime sex partners.
Sociosexuality has been linked to the continuum of erotophobia and erotophilia.
The construct of erotophobia-erotophilia has been operationalized the Sexual Opinion
Survey (SOS; Fisher et al., 1988). The measure works to clarify an individual’s
preference and comfortability with eroticism. The spectrum of erotophobia-erotophilia
shows the learned attitudes in responding to sexual cues along a negative–positive
dimension of affect and evaluation (Fisher). Individuals that scored high in
sociosexuality reported being more erotophilic than those who were sexually restricted.
Erotophilia encompasses group sex and sex acts with more than one partner, which
would strongly go against the views on individuals who report being sexually restricted.
Sociosexuality is also shown to predict and be predicted by many other non-
sexual factors: risk taking, impulsivity (Seal & Agostinelli,1994), attachment style
(Simon, 1997), dark triad traits (i.e. narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy)
(Jonason et al, 2009), masculinity (Clark, 2004), eveningness vs morningness
(Jankowski et al, 2014), self monitoring (Sakaguchi et al, 2007), and intrinsic vs extrinsic
religious orientation (Rowatt & Schmitt, 2003). Leads us to believe that sociosexuality is
deeply rooted in personality traits and may be more genetic rather than learned.
Other research has shown how certain personality traits can be predictors of
sociosexuality. In one study, unrestricted men described themselves as irresponsible,
unproductive, not warm, not anxious, and assertive compared to their restricted
counterparts (Reise & Wright 1996). Most personality research concerning
sociosexuality uses the Big-Five personality traits as predictors for sociosexuality.

The Big-Five Personality Traits
The five-factor model of personality is a broad organization of personality traits in
containing five basic dimensions of personality: openness vs. closeness to experience
(O), conscientiousness vs. lack of direction (C), extraversion vs. introversion (E),
agreeableness vs. antagonism (A), and neuroticism vs emotional stability (N) or
(OCEAN). It is important to note that these characteristics are all scale items, and one’s
measure on the Big-Five inventory is the degree to which they align themselves with
each dichotomous variable of the five-factor model.
Many psychologists believe that the five-factor model provides a general
structure of important personality traits and should be used as an accepted
classification scheme to organize phenomena and to formulate and test hypotheses
regarding individual differences in personality (Digman,1990; Goldberg, 1993; Ozer &
Reise, 1994).
The accepted tool for reporting one’s responses on the Big-Five personality traits
is the Big-Five Inventory (BFI; (Srivastava, 1999)). In the past the BFI has been used to
use personality traits to predict sociosexuality in Caucasian and Asian college students
(Wright & Reise, 1997). Wright & Reise found that extraversion, low agreeableness and
low neuroticism were direct predictors of unrestricted sociosexuality. In a separate study
by the same authors observed the relationship between personality and sociosexuality
and provided evidence that extraversion and agreeableness were the best predictors of
sexual behavior in college aged women (Wright & Reise, 1999).

In the current study, Wright & Reise’s research was replicated using college
students and a random sample using by using the BFI (a similar model to the NEO-PI-R
for assessing the Big-Five personality traits) to predict explicit and implicit sociosexual
attitudes.
The IAT
Ideas about sociosexuality have previously only been observed explicitly, using
the SOI and the SOI-R, however implicit ideas about sociosexuality can be measured
implicitly using an Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) The IAT, a
reaction time task, measures differential associations of 2 target concepts with an
attribute. Most commonly the IAT is used to uncover hidden racial biases. In this study,
the IAT attempts to provide a measure for the strength of implicit associations of
sociosexuality to positive or negative outcomes in memory in students at Bates College
and a random sample. We know that there is variance in responses on the SOI-R when
measuring sociosexuality explicitly. One concern is whether or not individuals will report
honestly on the questionnaire. Using an IAT, I attempted to find an unbiased measure of
sociosexuality by using implicit associations of “casual sex” and “monogamous
relationships.”
To do this, unrestricted sex related words and restricted sex related words were
paired with either positive or negative words. In the study’s IAT, the category label of
“unrestricted sex” was replaced with “casual sex” and the category label of “restricted
sex” was replaced with “monogamous relationship” to appear more familiar to
participants and free of jargon. Reaction times on each trial were measured to uncover

any hidden biases about sociosexuality and provide an honest, unbiased assessment of
one’s preference for restricted or unrestricted sex.
I then compared participants’ explicit and implicit measures of sociosexuality to
look for trends. Lastly, I used participants’ results on the BFI personality questionnaire
to predict measures of implicit and explicit sociosexuality.
The first goal of this study is to replicate Wright & Reise (1997)’s findings to
determine which of the Big-Five personality traits; openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (OCEAN), predict
preferences for either unrestricted sex or restricted sex.
The second, and perhaps main goal of the study was to accurately assess
sociosexuality through an IAT. Sociosexuality has never been assessed through implicit
measures and, a main goal of this study is to validate the IAT as a useful method to
assessing implicit sociosexual attitudes. One way to validate the Unrestricted
Sex/Restricted Sex IAT (UR-IAT) is to test for convergent validity with the SOI-R, which
has already been proven successful at measuring sociosexual attitudes. I am curious as
to if the UR-IAT) can predict the same outcomes as the SOI-R.
I then used the data to determine which Big-Five personality traits predict explicit
and implicit preferences for either unrestricted sex or restricted sex. Personality data
predicted accurate and convergent predictions about sociosexuality with the UR-IAT
and the SOI-R I providing evidence to validate the UR-IAT as a viable method for
implicitly measuring sociosexual attitudes.
Method

Participants
This study contains (400) participants. (270) participants were recruited a
compensated through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and (200) were college aged students
recruited through the internet and students in a Psychology 101 class. The two separate
groups aim to recruit a diverse pool of participants with variability in age, race,
geographic location, and gender.
Measures
All measures were administered through an online survey within the Qualtrics
utility accessible through a link. Within the survey, the measures administered during
this study include the Big-Five Inventory (BFI; (Srivastava, 1999)) to assess participants’
personality traits in the Big-Five model. This model has already been developed and
has been used and tested in many psychology studies to accurately assess the Big-Five
personality traits (Costa & McCrae, 2008). Participants also completed the Revised
Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI-R) to explicitly describe their sociosexual
attitudes and preferences toward uncommitted or committed sex. This model has
already been developed and used in many psychology studies (Penke & Asendorpf,
2008). Participants completed the survey in English using SOI-R items with 9-point
response scales. The survey contains 9 questions asking participants about three major
aspects of sociosexuality; past behavioral experiences, attitudes toward uncommitted
sex, and sociosexual desire. Both the BFI and the SOI-R can be found in the appendix.

After the finishing the Big-Five Inventory and the SOI-R, participants completed
an IAT to measure implicit sociosexual attitudes. It follows the model previous IATs
have used to assess bias against racial groups (Richeson & Shelton, 2005), however
for this experiment participants completed a modified pencil-paper IAT. The pencil-
paper IAT was developed as a way for participants to complete an IAT using only a
pencil and paper and could be completed without the use of a computer. It has been
shown test-retest reliability comparable to the computer-format IAT (Lemm, 2008).
Because an online version of the IAT was not available, I chose to modify the pencil-
paper IAT to be built into the Qualtrics survey to become a drag and drop task.
The requires participants to categorize casual sex-related and monogamy-related
words, and positive and negative words as quickly as possible by pressing one of two
response keys. Positive and negative words were taken from the original IAT developed
by Greenwald et al, (1998). Examples of positive words that were used are paradise,
vacation, rainbow, gentle, cheer, and smile (Greenwald). Examples of negative words
that were used are accident, disaster, poverty, hatred, grief, and stink (Greenwald).
For the “casual sex” and “monogamous relationship” categories, a pilot test on
through Qualtrics determined which words are associated with each category before the
IAT was created and administered. Participants in the pilot study were shown a large
collection of words believed to represent either a “monogamous relationship” or “casual
sex.” They then placed the word presented to them in either category to see if the words
chosen accurately represent the category. Words in the “casual sex” category,
associated with having sex outside of monogamous, committed relationship were
chosen to be: casual, player, hooking up, fuck buddy, random hookup, and booty call.

These words were chosen in the pilot study to be the most associated with the category
label of “casual sex.” Words in the “monogamous relationship” category include words
associated with monogamous relationships: stable, partner, soulmate, exclusive,
monogamous, and living together. These words were chosen in the pilot study to be the
most associated with the category label of “monogamous relationship.” All words were
also chosen to correspond with each-other in the metric of character count. Each
“casual sex” related word was paired with a “monogamous relationship” related word
with a similar length and character count to control for word length biasing the sorting
task.
The IAT contained 7 blocks of trials. Each block contained 40 trials. Participants
were shown a list of words and asked to drag and drop them using a computer mouse
to whichever one of the two boxes they correspond to. The two boxes were stacked on
represented vertically to the right of the word list. After several blocks of introductory
and practice trials, participants completed the first test block in which they were asked
to drag and drop casual sex-related words and positive words in a shared box, and
asked to drag and drop monogamy-related and negative words into a separate shared
block (Causal sex+/Monogamous relationship- Block) with a restricted time limit (15s).
Then the associations were reversed (Monogamous relationship-/Casual sex+ Block)-
monogamy-related words and negative words shared a box and casual sex-related
words and positive words shared a box. After practice trials on the new association
scheme, participants completed a second testing block.
Before the survey was released, a pilot test was conducted to validate the
original 16 second time limit in the drag and drop IAT task. In the pilot study participants

completed almost all items in the task creating a possible ceiling effect. To decrease the
total amount of words the participants were able to categorize I changed the time limit
from 16 seconds to 15 seconds, increasing the difficulty of the task. Additionally, in the
pilot task I found that the use of the word loyal as a word is the positive category was
often confused as a monogamy-related word and created a confound in the task. As a
result, the word loyal was replaced with smile as a sample positive word in the task.
The order of presentation of these two testing blocks was counter-balanced
across participants, and each testing block consists of 40 trials. The location of certain
boxes was counterbalanced so that one box was not always shown on top of the other.
The difference between average latencies during the Casual Sex+/Monogamous
Relationship- Block and the average latencies during the Monogamous Relationship-
/Casual Sex+ Block provided our index of each target’s level of implicit sociosexuality
scores.
Table 1: Experiment blocking in UR-IAT
Sequence # Top Box Bottom Box
1 Casual Sex Monogamous Relationship
2 Negative Positive
3* Casual Sex + Negative Monogamous Relationship
+ Positive
4 Monogamous Relationship Casual Sex
5* Monogamous Relationship
+ Negative
Casual Sex + Positive

*Trials are performed twice
Procedure
All participants completed the Big-Five Inventory, the SOI-R, and the modified
pencil-paper IAT online within the Qualtrics survey. Participants were also asked to fill
out a brief demographics survey including a Kinsey scale to measure participants’
sexual orientation (Kinsey), a measure for need for cognition, and other standard
demographics.

Thesis Max Alley

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