Page 328 - Cultures and Organizations

Light or Dark? 293

Indulgence Versus Restraint and
Sexual Relationships

U.S. psychologist David Schmitt founded the International Sexual-
ity Description Project and coordinated a number of interesting cross-
kcultural studies under its umbrella. One of them focused on what he called
sociosexuality. According to Schmitt, this is a single strategic dimension of
human mating: 39

Those who are relatively low on this dimension are said to possess a restricted
sociosexual orientation—they tend toward monogamy, prolonged court-
ship, and heavy emotional investment in long-term relationships. Those
residing at the high end of sociosexuality are considered more unrestricted
in mating orientation, they tend toward promiscuity, are quick to have sex,
and experience lower levels of romantic relationship closeness.

The findings of Schmitt and his team show that self-reported female socio-

sexuality is strongly positively correlated with individualism/universalism
(and strongly negatively with collectivism/exclusionism). This could mean
that women in Western countries are more liberated sexually, but a paral-
lel interpretation, which does not preclude the fi rst one, is that women in
collectivist countries are more inhibited when discussing their sexuality.
It is interesting that the reported male sociosexuality differences do not
correlate significantly with individualism and exclusionism. Men, all over

the world, are probably less reluctant to talk about sex, and in many cul-
tures they are actually inclined to boast about their exploits—be they real
or imaginary.
This means that conclusions about national differences in sociosexual-

ity on the basis of self-reports should be guarded. However, across wealthy
countries, in which sex is less likely to be a taboo subject, respondents can
be expected to be somewhat sincere about it, at least in anonymous surveys.
Results from paper-and-pencil studies are therefore probably more reliable.
All told, differences in individualism (and hence in the degree to which
respondents are inclined to be outspoken) and in masculinity, with its
taboos, may still contribute to differences in self-reported sociosexuality.
Nevertheless, across twenty-one wealthy countries, national sociosexuality
scores for men as well as for women correlated positively with indulgence. 40
This correlation suggests another facet of the indulgence versus restraint
dimension: members of more indulgent societies, especially wealthy ones,