Big Five Traits Related to Short-Term Mating: From Personality to Promiscuity across 46 Nations

By D. Schmitt, T. Shackelford. 2008

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, 13,243 participants from 46 nations responded to self-report measures of personality and mating behavior. Several traits showed consistent links with short-term mating. Extraversion positively correlated with interest in short-term mating, unrestricted sociosexuality, having engaged in short-term mate poaching attempts, having succumbed to short-term poaching attempts of others, and lacking relationship exclusivity. Low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness also related to short-term mating, especially with extra-pair mating. Neuroticism and openness were associated with short-term mating as well, but these links were less consistent across sex and nation. Nation-level links between personality and sexuality replicated within-region findings, such as the strong association between national extraversion and national sociosexuality. Discussion focuses on the origins of personality-sexuality links and their implications across nations.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Psychiatry and Mental health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6fea648a8cef0c0e22e9d44941242d8c145a113

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. P. Jonason
2. M. Back
3. K. Valentine
4. Norman P. Li
5. L. Penke
6. Carmelita L. Harbeson
7. Jens B. Asendorpf
8. R. Mõttus

In Psychiatry and Mental health

1. M. Back
2. R. Mõttus
3. P. Jonason

In Sociology and Political Science

1. L. Penke
2. P. Jonason
3. K. Valentine
4. Carmelita L. Harbeson
5. Jens B. Asendorpf
6. Norman P. Li
7. M. Back
8. R. Mõttus

Citations in the corpus

• Reproductive Behavior and Personality Traits of the Five Factor Model (2011, unknown): “While these studies suggest a role for personality differences in determining fertility behavior, many important issues remain to be addressed.”
• Towards More Rigorous Personality Trait–Outcome Research (2016, background): “Other types of outcomes refer to a variety of more specific behaviours such as volunteering (Carlo, Okun, Knight, & de Guzman, 2005), mate poaching (Schmitt & Shackelford, 2008), residential mobility (Jokela, 2009), eating habits (Mõttus, McNeill, Jia, Starr, & Deary, 2013b), smoking and drinking…”
• From Dating to Mating and Relating: Predictors of Initial and Long–Term Outcomes of Speed–Dating in a Community Sample (2011, background): “…strangers, had more predictive power than the FFM dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism with which sociosexuality and shyness correlate: Sociosexuality with high extraversion (Schmitt & Shackelford, 2008), and shyness with low extraversion and high neuroticism (e.g. Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998).”
• Mate-selection and the Dark Triad: Facilitating a short-term mating strategy and creating a volatile environment (2011, background): “In addition, because the Dark Triad are related to numerous facets of the Big Five and the Big Five are all related to mating outcomes (Schmitt & Shackelford, 2008), we felt it necessary to control for the whole of the Big Five while not increasing subject fatigue while completing the…”