A recent post focused on racial differences in psychopathy, and while people know the obvious connection between being a psychopath and committing crimes, few realize that the correlation between a promiscuous lifestyle and psychopathy is about as strong. In fact, a lifestyle of casual sex is one criterion for diagnosing psychopathic personality. Evolutionary psychologists have developed the concept of sociosexuality, which refers to an interest in non-committal sex. The correlation between sociosexuality and psychopathy is roughly 0.4, an impressive number. It's strong enough that factor analysis would probably reveal one supertrait that underlies psychopathy, criminality, and sociosexuality--a syndrome we could call exploitativeness.
So, are there racial and ethnic differences in sociosexuality or exploitativeness (as indicated by high sociosexuality)? The General Social Survey does have one item used in sociosexuality inventories--the number of sexual partners since age 18. Let's pick an arbitrary cutoff--25+ partners--to indicate exploitativeness. For now, I will focus on men and will limit analysis to ethnic groups with at least 50 respondents (sample size = 10,789):
Percent with 25+ sexual partners since age 18
Black 24.3
Scottish 19.8
Spanish 19.7
Jewish 19.1
American Indian 18.2
Greek 18.2
Italian 16.6
Puerto Rican 15.7
Other Spanish 14.9
Norwegian 14.6
Irish 14.4
Percent for total sample 14.1
Russian 13.9
French 13.5
English/Welsh 12.9
Austrian 11.5
Polish 11.4
German 11.2
French Canadian 10.2
Swedish 10.1
Dutch 9.9
Mexican 8.7
Danish 8.2
Czech 7.8
Asian Indian 4.1
Filipino 3.3
Chinese 0.0
You can see that by selecting a cutoff of 25 partners, this gives us 14.1% of US men being exploitative. More importantly for this post, we see tremendous diversity in this trait. Almost one-quarter of black men are exploitative compared to ZERO Chinese men. Looking at general patterns, Southern Europeans tend to have higher numbers, while Asians fall to the bottom. These patterns are consistent with numbers presented in Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality. He found high psychopathy among blacks and American Indians, moderate levels among whites, and low levels among Asians.
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These are interesting results. How does this relate to the famous "cruelty" and "lack of mercy" traits found among Chinese and American Indians?
ReplyDeleteOrganized cruelty has a different dynamic than individual cruelty. History shows that conscientious, high-IQ groups (e.g., Japanese, Germans) can be brutal, and efficiently so.
ReplyDeleteThe norm is to attribute negative traits, attributes, motivations like cruelty to out-groups, regardless of objective considerations. For example, many blacks today believe white cops, whites in general are disproportionately hostile or racist towards them and disproportionately target them and cruelly kill them in police shootings, even though objectively this isn't true. Deviations from this norm seem to correlate with the above measures of exploitativeness or psychopathy: blacks and Jews are among the most exploitative according to the above measure, and they are unique in the relative lack of hostility and positive favor they enjoy from out-groups. Blacks and Jews are regarded as uniquely saintly and special by many whites and other out-groups, which short-circuits to a large degree the normal hostility and suspicion they would receive for simply being out-groups. This would make sense since exploitativeness consists of being able to manipulate minds, emotions, feelings. People less adept at such manipulation are going to be less successful at getting out-groups to deviate from the norm of viewing out-groups with hostility and suspicion.
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