Richard Lippa: Cal State University, Fullerton Department of Psychology

BBC data from 53 nations and from more than 200,000 participants provide new insights into sex differences
in: (1) sexual traits (e.g., sex drive and sociosexuality), (2) mate preferences (e.g., the value assigned to
physical attractiveness, intelligence, honesty in a mate), (3) personality traits (e.g., extraversion,
agreeableness, neuroticism, people-versus-thing orientation), and (4) cognitive abilities (mental rotation
ability, line angle judgment ability). Predictions that follow from social role theory—e.g., that sex differences
will be larger in countries with stronger gender roles—received little support in the BBC data. In contrast,
predictions that follow from evolutionary theories—e.g., that there will be consistent sex differences across
nations, which do not covary with nations’ levels of gender equality—received support for many of the
assessed sex differences. Results for sociosexuality (sex differences were larger in patriarchal than in
gender-egalitarian nations, and women’s sociosexuality varied more across nations than men’s did) were
consistent with a hybrid model—that cultural factors influence women’s sociosexuality more than men’s and
are superimposed on biologically-based sex differences. Results for sex differences in trait SDs (e.g., across
nations, women varied more than men did in sex drive and extraversion; men varied more than women did in
agreeableness and mental rotation scores) also tended to support biological theories over social structural
theories, except in the case of sociosexuality, where results were consistent with a hybrid model that
assumed cultural influences superimposed on biological predispositions: for sociosexuality, men were more
variable than women in patriarchal countries, but the reverse was true in gender-egalitarian countries.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Lippa_sex_drive_and_sociosexuality_UCLA%5B1%5D.doc