[Nodrog]

Originally Posted by All Systems Go

I found the article interesting to read in the tone seemed to far more surprised than you would probably expect. I also found it to be rather amusing, in a disturbing kind of way.

Yeah, I think this is characteristic of media reporting of science in general and ties into deeper social problems about how information is presented to the public. Science tends to be reported in an extremely uncritical manner, with studies often made out to be a lot more important than they are. This obviously ties in with media sensationalism in general, but more importantly I think it stems from the way that news media is often passively consumed with audiences devouring it in a very unthinking way. Noone wants to spend more than a few seconds thinking about the implications of some study they read in the paper, they just want to consume the article and move onto whatever unrelated 'news' item is on the next page. In a printed medium, this study would probably be sandwiched between a report about a war in some farway country, and an item of celebrity gossip.

I dont think scientists are entirely blame-free either. Modern academic culture and the emphasis on publication-for-promotion gives academics a strong incentive to talk up their research in order to make themselves look good. I think scientists talking to outsiders (eg media) will often try to make their work sound a lot more ground-breaking than it is for this reason, and journalists are often too uneducated about the relevant literature in order to check. It might not even be conscious deception; most researchers probably believe that what theyre doing has some kind of importance, even when many outsiders would disagree.

Also, in the case of social sciences (eg social psychology like this), the modern orientation towards positivism means that there is a strong emphasis on quantitative studies which promotes the kind of trivial research that you linked to, and de-emphasises more potentially interesting qualitiative interpretative research which may not be as easily supportable by data (or at least, not by the sort of 'neat' data you can get by using popular research methods like surveys/psychometric tests/etc).

This is a major problem with any sort of study about reasons though. Apart from whether a consiously lying, there is also lying to themselves or an action caused by unconsious motives which may differ from the ones we believe we are following.

Yeah, I was talking more about unconscious motives. I think theyve got round the problem of deliberately lying by phrasing the question in a way which makes no distinction between the respondent's personal motives and the motives of their friends. But I suspect unconscious motivations will be more interesting than conscious reasons in the majority of sexual encounters, especially since we live in a society where sex is so commodified and there are often strong expectations on people to have sex in the right way, with the right people, in the right circumstances.