Social psychology

Social psychology is the study of how we think about, influence, and relate to other people. Some of the major topics surrounding sex/sexuality that social psychologists study are sexual attraction, relationships between intimate partners, sexual violence and violence between intimate partners, and prejudice/discrimination toward sexual minorities.

One famous social psychological study was conducted by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield in 1989. They had an attractive woman approach different men on a large college campus. After introducing herself, the woman would claim to have noticed the man around campus and found him attractive. Then, she would ask the man three questions: Would you go out on a date with me? Would you go back to my apartment with me? Would you go to bed with me? Clark and Hatfield also repeated the experiment with an attractive man approaching different women walking around campus.

What did they find? While men and women were equally likely to agree to go out on a date with the study confederate, men were much more likely to agree to go back to the person’s apartment, and even more likely to agree to go to bed with her. In fact, while no women agreed to go to bed with the stranger, more men (75%) agreed to this scenario than to just going on a date (50%)!

This study inspired many more studies that investigated sociosexuality, or the interest in casual sex. We will return to the Clark and Hatfield study later in the course to consider other factors that may influence sociosexuality.

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of internal mental processes. Often, cognitive psychologists study brain activity alongside environmental factors. In addition, some cognitive psychologists work with animals (largely primates) to make inferences about human behavior.

Cognitive psychologists have long sought to understand sex/gender differences and connect cognitive differences to biological differences. One set of findings suggest that males have an advantage in math because they have better spatial cognition (knowledge about spatial environments) than females do (Geary et al., 2000). We will return to a discussion of sex/gender differences in a later module.

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology uses the application of evolutionary principles to study the human mind and human behavior. Many aspects of human mating behavior have been studied cross-culturally (and in naturalistic settings) in an effort to understand how evolution has influenced our genes to interact with the environment in ways that promote certain sexual feelings and behaviors. Researchers have looked at a wide variety of behavioral patterns such as why females across the world tend to be pickier than males when choosing a sex partner, why sexual vs. emotional jealousy may show a sex difference, and why we find some people more attractive than others.

Evolutionary psychologists have used Darwin’s sexual selection theory to posit that females and males follow different reproductive strategies because they experience different kinds of risks in their reproductive pursuits. Two main features of sexual selection that are commonly seen in nonhuman animals are competition among males and choice by females.