How often do men think about sex? Every seven seconds? Probably not. But rather than wonder about whether this is true, Tom Stafford asks how on earth you can prove it.
Every
seven seconds? Probably not. But rather than wonder about whether this
is true, Tom Stafford asks how on earth you can prove it.
How often do men really think about sex?
Tom Stafford
(Getty Images)
Every seven seconds? Probably not. But rather than wonder about whether
this is true, Tom Stafford asks how on earth you can actually prove it
or not.
We've all been told that men think about you-know-what far too often –
every seven seconds, by some accounts. Most of us have entertained this
idea for long enough to be sceptical. However, rather than merely
wonder about whether this is true, stop for a moment to consider how you
could – or could not – prove it.
If we believe the stats,
thinking about sex every seven seconds adds up to 514 times an hour. Or
approximately 7,200 times during each waking day. Is that a lot? It
sounds like a big number to me, I’d imagine it’s bigger than the number
of thoughts I have about anything in a day. So, here’s an interesting
question: how is it possible to count the number of mine, or anyone
else’s thoughts (sexual or otherwise) over the course of a day?
The scientific attempt to measure thoughts is known to psychologists as "experience sampling".
It involves interrupting people as they go about their daily lives and
asking them to record the thoughts they are having right at that moment,
in that place. Terri Fisher and her research team
at Ohio State University did this using 'clickers'. They gave these to
283 college students, divided into three groups, and asked them to press
and record each time they thought about sex, or food, or sleep.
If you were asked to record every time you thought about
sex during the day, how many times do you think you would admit to it?
(Thinkstock)
Using this method they found that the average man in their
study had 19 thoughts about sex a day. This was more than the women in
their study – who had about 10 thoughts a day. However, the men also had
more thoughts about food and sleep, suggesting perhaps that men are
more prone to indulgent impulses in general. Or they are more likely to
decide to count any vague feeling as a thought. Or some combination of
both.
The interesting thing about the study was the large
variation in number of thoughts. Some people said they thought about sex
only once per day, whereas the top respondent recorded 388 clicks, which is a sexual thought about every two minutes.
However, the big confounding factor with this study is "ironic processes", more commonly known as the "white bear problem".
If you want to have cruel fun with a child tell them to put their hand
in their air and only put it down when they've stopped thinking about a
white bear. Once you start thinking about something, trying to forget it
just brings it back to mind.
This is exactly the circumstances
the participants in Fisher's study found themselves in. They were given a
clicker by the researchers and asked to record when they thought about
sex (or food or sleep). Imagine them walking away from the psychology
department, holding the clicker in their hand, trying hard not to think
about sex all the time, yet also trying hard to remember to press the
clicker every time they did think about it. My bet is that the poor man
who clicked 388 times was as much a victim of the experimental design as
he was of his impulses. Always on my mind
Another approach, used by Wilhelm Hoffman and colleagues,
involved issuing German adult volunteers with smartphones, which were
set to notify them seven times a day at random intervals for a week.
They were asked to record what featured in their most recent thoughts
when they received the random alert, the idea being that putting the
responsibility for remembering onto a device left participants' minds
more free to wander.
The results aren't directly comparable to the
Fisher study, as the most anyone could record thinking about sex was
seven times a day. But what is clear is that people thought about it far
less often than the seven-second myth suggests. They recorded a sexual
thought in the last half hour on approximately 4% of occasions, which
works out as about once per day, compared with 19 reported in the Fisher
study.
The real shock from Hoffman's study is the relative
unimportance of sex in the participants' thoughts. People said they
thought more about food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time
off, and (until about 5pm) coffee. Watching TV, checking email and other
forms of media use also won out over sex for the entire day. In fact,
sex only became a predominant thought towards the end of the day (around
midnight), and even then it was firmly in second place, behind sleep.
Sleep is the thing the average man thinks about most towards the end of the night, apparently (Getty Images)
Hoffman's method is also contaminated by a white bear effect,
though, because participants knew at some point during the day they'd be
asked to record what they had been thinking about. This could lead to
overestimating some thoughts. Alternately, people may have felt
embarrassed about admitting to having sexual thoughts throughout the
day, and therefore underreported it.
So, although we can
confidently dismiss the story that the average male thinks about sex
every seven seconds, we can't know with much certainty what the true
frequency actually is. Probably it varies wildly between people, and
within the same person depending on their circumstances, and this is
further confounded by the fact that any efforts to measure the number of
someone's thoughts risks changing those thoughts.
There’s also
the tricky issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement.
Thoughts aren't like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and
kilometres. So what constitutes a thought, anyway? How big does it need
to be to count? Have you had none, one or many while reading this?
Plenty of things to think about! copy http://www.bbc.com
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