Sexual Morality: Multidimensionality and Sex Differences

Despite the increase in the scientific study of morality over the past decade, one important domain remains relatively underexplored-sexual morality. The current article begins to fill this gap by exploring its multidimensionality and testing several evolution-based hypotheses about sex differences in moralizing distinct components of sexual morality, including incest, sexual coercion, sexual infidelity, and short-term mating. Study 1 (N = 920) and Study 2 (N = 543) tested predictions derived from evolutionary psychological hypotheses and used factor analysis to identify seven core factors of sexual morality separately for male and female actors: infidelity, short-teen sex, sexual coercion, outgroup sex, long-term mating, same-sex sexuality, and paraphilic sex. Study 3 (N= 380) provided an independent test of the evolution-based hypotheses and factor structure. Results strongly support sex-differentiated predictions about short-term sex, but not sexual coercion or incest (possibly owing to ceiling effects). Discussion centers around sexual morality as a complex domain not readily explained by more domain-general theories of morality and the necessity of comprehensive theories of morality to include sex-differentiated components in their formulations.