IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT, BAD IDEAS SEEM LIKE GOOD IDEAS
In most experiments, participants are asked to make decisions while sitting in a laboratory. It isn’t at all clear that the decisions people make in that environment are the same decisions they would make in a state of sexual arousal. Economists Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein are, as far as I know, the only scholars in my field who have asked participants (all male students) to masturbate while reporting on their decision making. As odd as that may sound, they found that the students made very different choices in a heightened sexual state than they did when they were not aroused.
For example, they asked participants whether or not they would take a date for a fancy dinner in order to encourage her to have sex with them. Just over half of the non-masturbating (and presumably nonaroused) participants said that they would pay more compared with 70 percent of the masturbating participants. When asked if they would tell their date that they loved her in order to get her to have sex with them, the share who said yes increased from 30 percent (nonaroused) to 50 percent (aroused). Sixty-three percent of masturbating participants would encourage their date to drink in the hope that it would increase the chance that he would get to have sex with her compared with 46 percent of the nonaroused. Twenty-six percent of the aroused participants said that they would be willing to slip her a drug and 45 percent of the same said they would persist with having sex after their date had said no. Finally, and this is not surprising, masturbating participants felt significantly less inclined to use protection against pregnancy or disease than did nonaroused participants.
The fact that people make different decisions when they are aroused than they would have otherwise explains, in part, why students (and everyone else) make choices that even they themselves might consider poor ones in a non-aroused state. Economics depends on individual players making rational decisions that weigh the costs against the benefits. In the heat of the moment, however, the costs are discounted (because they are in the future) and the benefits heightened (because they are immediate).
Rationality, as I have already said, doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of regret.
The results for the question as to whether or not John should have felt entitled to sex when the date was cheap and the price shared fell to 2.20 for male participants (down from 2.93) and to 1.53 for female participants (down from 2.15).
What this evidence tells us is that even if female students, on average, don’t feel Kate was obliged to have sex with John, or that he was right to expect it, they certainly seem to think that her obligation and his expectations are directly tied to how much John spent on their date together. So, the difference between male and female students’ expectations about sex is not whether or not men are entitled to have sex after paying for a date; the difference is in how much the man has to pay before he is entitled.
That brings us back to where we started.
To say that it is a buyer’s market for men on university campuses implies that on the campus market for sex the supply exceeds the demand. If that is true, then the price of sex should be falling. As I said earlier, the use of the word “price” does not imply that men need to compensate women to have sex with them; it could simply imply that they don’t need to invest in a relationship in order to get laid. I also said that on campuses with more men than women, female students went on far more traditional dates than on campuses with more women than men. If a date is costly for a man, either in terms of his time or his money, then it isn’t that surprising that in a buyer’s market there is less traditional dating. It is entirely possible that both men and women in such markets revise down their expectations of how much a man should have to pay to sufficiently oblige a woman to have sex with him.
It might also be true that raising the price of drinks in student bars could actually increase promiscuity if it means that women feel a greater obligation to have sex with a man who has not only been buying her drinks but has been buying her expensive drinks.
At the beginning of this chapter, I told you that I have a hard time convincing my students that, on average, they have sex less frequently than people their own age who are not in school. Given how much promiscuity there is on university campuses this may seem just as unlikely to you as it does to them, but the surprising fact is that this is true.
The explanation for this is simple: people who have multiple one-night stands have sex less frequently, on average, than those in committed relationships. The DeSimone research I mentioned earlier finds that students who had had sex with more than one person over the past three months had sex less frequently than those who only had one sexual partner. In fact, those who had sex more than twenty times in the last month were much more likely to have had only one sexual partner than they were to have had multiple sexual partners.
If women outnumber men in college, and if sex markets are essentially closed (students have sex only with other students and nonstudents sex only with nonstudents), then in the population of people aged 19 to 25 who are not students, there must be more men than women. We have already shown that when men outnumber women there is more traditional dating, which would explain why nonstudents have sex more frequently than do those operating on the college market; it is because they are more likely to be in a relationship than their college counterparts.
FINAL WORDS
Poor Sarah! It is too bad she didn’t see this evidence before her disastrous first term. Maybe then she would have understood that while she was freely making her own sexual decisions, she was also subject to market forces that were beyond her control. This is good information for students, parents, colleges, and governments to have if they want to make informed decisions around promiscuity on college campuses.
For example, parents who worry that promiscuity will impose a high cost in the long run on their college-aged children would be well advised to look for schools in which male students outnumber female students. That argument probably seems counterintuitive to those parents whose daughters are college bound, but when seen within the economic environment, it makes sense to avoid putting your daughter in a position in which she needs to compete with many other women on the market for college dates.
Likewise, colleges that worry that the cost of student promiscuity imposes too high a cost on the institution—for example, when it leads to high rates of student attrition—might consider if they are giving preferential admission to female applicants. If they are, then eliminating that bias should raise the “price” of sex on their campus (measured in terms of the investment needed to secure a sexual relationship) by making male partners less scarce. Raising the price of promiscuity should reduce the overall level of casual sexual relationships on campus.
Again, the economic approach yields counterintuitive advice; it recommends that in order to lower the rate of casual sex and raise the rate of traditional dating on campus colleges, they should encourage the enrollment of more students who are naturally inclined to be promiscuous, that is, men.
My final example of how useful this information is for those who want to make informed decisions stems from the recognition that the college sex market is not an entirely free market in the sense that it is subject to the outside influence of government policy. Governments have the power to influence college sex markets through laws that control the distribution and taxation of alcohol. You might very well feel that governments have no business in the bedrooms of the nation. However, if specific alcohol policies (like having a legal drinking age of 21) are leading to binge drinking and, as a result, higher rates of promiscuity on college campuses, then changing those policies is not, in the market sense, interfering in the sex lives of the individual. On the contrary, it is removing an existing market distortion that has already shifted the equilibrium away from the one that would be found in free market.
Again, applying the statistical tools used by economists leads us to a counterintuitive recommendation—alcohol prohibitions that encourage binge drin
king should be removed if governments feel that promiscuity imposes too high a cost on students and society.
Eventually, almost everyone decides it is time to search for a longer-term relationship (and the possibility of more frequent sex!). When that happens, many people will consider using the Internet to find themselves a mate. And for that, I thank them. Online dating has provided economists with a virtual treasure trove of data with which to untangle the desires of the human heart. It is a little voyeuristic, I admit, but you might just see a little bit of yourself in the next chapter, in which we will take an economic view of love in the era of cyberspace.
3 Only about 42 percent of Canadian university students are male, but for some reason, male students have made up 66 percent of the students in my Economics of Sex and Love class.
4 Results tabulated by Donald Cox.
CHAPTER 3
LOVE IN CYBERSPACE
HOW ONLINE DATING DIFFERS FROM BUYING SWEETS
It would be a lie for me to tell you that I have been single so long that it is starting to get embarrassing—it started to be embarrassing a long time ago, and now it is just plain awkward. This seems like the type of information you might want to hide on a first date, like an eating disorder or the fact that you used to smoke a lot of pot. But just like a job interview, prospective mates want to know what experience you bring to the “position.” And while few people are looking for a new partner who has had a string of lovers in the past six months, you have to admit that a (very) long period without dating makes one look like the car that has been sitting in the lot all year-round—probably a lemon.
Personally, I need to come up with an excuse for this protracted period without a partner. My friends tell me that mine (“I’ve been too busy”) is not very convincing and that I need to come up with a more creative explanation, something more appealing that prospective buyers will believe, like “I’ve just been loving the single life!”
Of course, I could just tell them the truth: that my rational mind has a problem with looking for love online and since that is where almost everyone else in my age group is looking, I am little out of luck.
It is not that I am judgmental of online love seekers; I am not, and I know that many people are finding love online. My problem is this: When rational decision makers are faced with a large number of options, they like to simplify. How do they do that? They use a process of elimination.
Let me use an analogy to illustrate why, for me personally, this is a problem.
Looking for a mate on an online dating site is like looking for a sweet in a pastry shop. In both cases, I wouldn’t know exactly what I was looking for at the beginning of the search, and so I would simplify the decision-making process by eliminating some of the possibilities. When there is a large variety of treats, or potential partners, I wouldn’t just eliminate individual possibilities, because that would be very time-consuming, but rather larger categories of possibilities. The difference between the two situations is that in the pastry shop, the categories of treats I have eliminated don’t disappear altogether—they stay in the case in front of me, making it impossible to ignore how delicious they must be.
For example, I would never just walk into a pastry shop and declare, “I will have a chocolate-raspberry macaron!” Instead, I might look around and decide that I don’t really want a cookie because I can easily make those at home and so eliminate cookies as a possible treat. Then I might think that I really like chocolate-covered caramels, but I already had chocolate this week. And so I’d take chocolates off the list of possible treats as well. I would continue to eliminate categories of treats until all I was left with, say, are éclairs and fruit tarts.
If on that particular day neither éclairs nor fruit tarts appeal to me, however, I wouldn’t just leave the shop feeling sad that while everyone else seems to find treats, I am going home empty-handed. No, I would take another look around and decide that what I really want, after all, is a chocolate-raspberry macaron, despite previously disavowing both cookies and chocolate, and I’d go home happy with my treat selection.
Decision making on online dating sites proceeds along the same lines, but the problem of choice is far more insidious. Online people are rejected as possible partners without ever having been seen—not because of who they are but because they have characteristics that fall into a broader category that was eliminated in order to make the search less time consuming.
If shopping for treats worked the same way as online dating sites, before I even started to consider my options I would have already filtered out the cookies by refining my search (literally, by using the site’s search filter) to “Things I can’t make at home.” And I would have screened for “Treats I haven’t had recently.” So, both macarons and chocolates would appear to be unavailable. At the end of the screening process, I would be left with a couple of choices, éclairs and tarts, that didn’t really interest me that day. What would I do then? Probably walk away with a sense of resignation about my treat-free existence, believing that no pastry shop out there produces the perfect treat for me.
When I consider the men in my life whom I have really loved, and there have been a couple, I honestly believe that they never would have survived a filtered search on an online dating site. They would have been too young or had too little education. They would have been the wrong religion or not nearly tall enough. Or they would have been underemployed or lived too far away.
Just as important, I doubt I would have survived their searches either.
My guess is that, after a little reflection, you would agree that many of the people in your life who have made you happy—including possibly the person you are with right now—wouldn’t pass muster based on a “must have” list that was searchable online. This is because online searches encourage us to find qualities that are easy to measure: age, height, education, race, income, etc. The quality of a relationship, however, is more about experiential qualities than it is about empirical qualities, and those are much harder to quantify and to search for online. This is why many online dating sites are now trying to capture experiential qualities by using search algorithms, but even those sites still allow searchers to screen out potential matches who fail to meet their quantitative criteria.
From an economics perspective, limited searches take “thick” markets and turn them into “thin” markets. The fact that online dating markets are thick should imply, in theory at least, that not only is it easier to find love on that market compared with a more traditional dating market but also that the relationships that form there are of a higher quality.
SLF—SINGLE LIBERAL FEMALE—SEEKS SLM FOR ROMANCE
The characteristic that married individuals have most in common with their partners, other than religious beliefs, is their political beliefs. If finding a marriage partner that shared their political beliefs were important, though, then singles would only search within the dating pool of those with their same beliefs, in the same way they might search within the pool of those who have the same level of education.
A recent paper by political scientists Casey Klofstad, Rose McDermott, and Peter Hatemi finds that most online daters choose not to advertise their political beliefs to potential mates, and that among the subset of people that were willing to explicitly state their political preference, the vast majority (more that 67 percent) stated their political beliefs as being “middle of the road,” “some other viewpoint,” or “no answer.”
Some specific groups of daters were willing to state their beliefs. Age mattered; older daters were more likely to state a political belief than were younger daters. Education mattered; college-educated daters were 15 percentage points more likely to state a political belief than were those with only high school.
Income mattered, but perhaps not the way you might expect. A single earning between $75,000 and $100,000 was 7 percentage points more likely to report political beliefs that were “middle of the road” than one who earned between $25,000 and $35,000.
>
The problem here is that the only way researchers can really determine preferences in dating is not to observe stated preferences on daters’ profiles but to observe the choices that daters make while operating on that market.
When psychologists Andrew Fiore, Lindsay Shaw Taylor, Gerald Mendelsohn, and Coye Cheshire examine the messaging behavior of online daters, they find that just because a dater stated a preference to find a mate of their same religion, that does not necessarily mean that was who they looked for when they searched.
For example, approximately 50 percent of older women indicated that same religion mattered, but less than 30 percent actually contacted men who fit that description. If researchers had considered only stated preferences, they might have concluded that the majority of older women were searching for a mate within the pool of single men of their same religion, but that is not the case.
In fact, men and woman of all ages exhibit a willingness to date outside of their religion, despite the observation that people frequently marry those who share their religious beliefs.
When we limit our searches, for example, when we only contact people who share our ethnicity, we create artificially thin dating markets—markets where there are few buyers and sellers—and it is difficult to settle on a price at which everyone is willing to trade. Not only do thin markets clear slowly, if at all, but also the matches that form on those markets are likely to be of lower quality.
Personally, I would like to limit my searches to “Men who feel soft and smell good when I roll over in the morning,” but even if I could, I suspect that when I filtered for “Men who are not hurt when I find their blunders hilarious,” there would be no one left on the list for me to consider.
Dollars and Sex Page 6