Smarter people have less premarital sex

As intelligence (as measured by the Wordsum vocabulary test of the General Social Survey) increases, people are more likely to think that premarital sex is okay:

PREMARSX 217. There's been a lot of discussion about the way morals and attitudes about sex are changing in this country. If a man and woman have sex relations before marriage, do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		PREMARSX
		1 ALWAYS WRONG	2 ALMST ALWAYS WRG	3 SOMETIMES WRONG	4 NOT WRONG AT ALL	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	28.1 18	12.5 8	17.2 11	42.2 27	100.0 64
	1	34.3 61	10.1 18	17.4 31	38.2 68	100.0 178
	2	36.2 140	10.6 41	14.5 56	38.8 150	100.0 387
	3	32.2 221	8.7 60	19.0 130	40.1 275	100.0 686
	4	30.2 370	9.6 117	18.2 223	42.0 514	100.0 1,224
	5	29.4 590	9.0 181	19.8 398	41.8 841	100.0 2,010
	6	28.3 760	9.0 241	20.7 555	42.1 1,131	100.0 2,687
	7	24.1 474	9.8 192	23.0 452	43.0 845	100.0 1,963
	8	23.9 298	10.7 133	21.7 271	43.7 545	100.0 1,247
	9	20.4 195	10.4 100	25.1 240	44.1 422	100.0 957
	10	13.7 94	9.3 64	28.7 197	48.3 332	100.0 687
	COL TOTAL	26.6 3,221	9.6 1,155	21.2 2,564	42.6 5,150	100.0 12,090

If you have been reading my blog, you should have expected the above results. I've consistently demonstrated how more intelligent people have more "liberal" views on non-economic issues.

What's surprising is the fact that, despite their more positive view of premarital sex, smarter people are less likely to report having premarital sex.

The following table is restricted to repondents who are (1) not married; (2) born in the U.S.; and (3) aged 18-39 (because after 40 people have less sex):

PARTNERS 1291. How many sex partners have you had in the last 12 months?
PLEASE CIRCLE ONE ANSWER.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		PARTNERS
		0	1	2 or more	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	28.6 2	71.4 5	.0 0	100.0 7
	1	17.8 5	62.5 16	19.7 5	100.0 25
	2	16.4 9	56.0 32	27.6 16	100.0 58
	3	16.0 17	62.1 65	21.8 23	100.0 105
	4	17.4 36	67.0 138	15.7 32	100.0 206
	5	15.0 52	64.9 224	20.2 70	100.0 346
	6	14.0 65	62.9 292	23.1 107	100.0 465
	7	19.6 66	61.1 207	19.3 65	100.0 338
	8	19.9 36	57.0 104	23.1 42	100.0 183
	9	30.2 32	54.6 59	15.2 16	100.0 108
	10	34.7 24	50.9 36	14.4 10	100.0 70
	COL TOTAL	18.1 345	61.7 1,179	20.3 388	100.0 1,912

We see a dramatic increase in celibacy as the Wordsum score increases above 6. (It's interesting to note that people with the median Wordsum score of 6 are the least likely to be celibate.)

Why do smarter people have less sex? It can't be because they find it immoral. Below are three theories. I have no idea which ones, if any, are correct:

(1) Smarter people understand that sex carries the risk of disease, and smarter people have better impulse control, so they avoid this desirable but unhealthy activity.

(2) Smarter people have lower sex drives. (A strong possibility because, for married respondents, frequency of sex decreases with intelligence.)

(3) Smarter people are less desirable sexual partners, so they have less opportunity to have sex.

Comments

[dearieme]

There's always the old joke: intellectuals are people who've found something more interesting than sex.

[dearieme]

As Auden remarked
"To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife."
So it's post-marital adulterous sex that attracts intellectuals. Any sign of that in the survey?

[Half Sigma]

13% of respondents reported cheating on their spouse, but 17% of respondents with Wordsum 10, 15% of respondents with Wordsum 9, and 16% of respondents with Wordsum 8 reported cheating on their spouse.

So yes, marital infidelity increases with intelligence, even though sex drive declines.

[Half Sigma]

The above numbers are for respondents currently married. The trend is the same if you add divorced respondents, but for obvious reasons the percent who reported cheating increases when you include divorced respondents.

[michael vassar]

The biggest surprise to me, by far, is that less than half of the respondents with Wordsum scores of 10 thought that premarital sex was "not wrong at all".
I'd like gender breakdowns for everything here. Also possibly race.

[Peter]

Smarter people are less desirable sexual partners, so they have less opportunity to have sex.

Definitely true with respect to males. Most of the sci-fi/Trek/D&D nerds who have zero luck finding women are pretty smart.

[Half Sigma]

Men are more likely than women to think that premarital sex is okay.

Blacks are more likely than whites to think that premarital sex is okay.

Nothing surprising about these findings.

[Half Sigma]

Peter: "Most of the sci-fi/Trek/D&D nerds who have zero luck finding women are pretty smart."

To appreciate sci-fi one has to be at least smart enough to understand the stories, which surely require more intellectual creativity from the audience than some of the other stuff on TV.

But "all sci-fi fans are smarter than average" doesn't mean that "all people smarter the average are sci-fi fans."

[SFG]

"Most of the sci-fi/Trek/D&D nerds who have zero luck finding women are pretty smart.
To appreciate sci-fi one has to be at least smart enough to understand the stories, which surely require more intellectual creativity from the audience than some of the other stuff on TV."

I don't know. A lot of scifi movies are pretty stupid.

I do admit you have to be good at math to play D&D. The magical nomenclature is really quite funny..."I, Garroth the Barbarian of the Wild Wastes, heft my...Battleaxe + 3!" come on. Battleaxe plus three? What's next, a dagger divided by 2? I suppose it's all in the eye of the beholder.

And everyone who groaned at that last one or had a brief image of a ball with eleven eyes flash through your head, how many times have you had premarital sex? ;)

[SFG]

"13% of respondents reported cheating on their spouse, but 17% of respondents with Wordsum 10, 15% of respondents with Wordsum 9, and 16% of respondents with Wordsum 8 reported cheating on their spouse."

I don't see a big trend here, and there are probably subgroups. At least break it down by gender. Given the effects of feminism I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, high-IQ or SES women are MUCH more likely to sleep around, whereas men like to mess around no matter what.

[Dennis Mangan]

Maybe smarter people are less charming, and thus have fewer partners. Anecdotally, I'd say that charm is negatively correlated with intelligence. Those less intelligent develop charm to compensate for deficiencies.

[Mark Seecof]

Perhaps our gracious host could check on the correlations among alcohol consumption, sex, and WORDSUM. I think the more you drink the more sex you have (to a point), and the smarter you are the less you drink (well, not counting a few years at university). I wouldn't be surprised to see that those who imbibe less get less nookie too.

[Half Sigma]

Mark, actually you have it backwards. Suprisingly, smarter people drink more than people of average intelligence. (This is actually not so surprising if you read the book Class by Paul Fussell.)

[SFG]

"Anecdotally, I'd say that charm is negatively correlated with intelligence. Those less intelligent develop charm to compensate for deficiencies."

I doubt it. Certainly being very smart is a social hindrance but so is being retarded. Probably there's some sort of optimal IQ.

[michael vassar]

I would expect the optimal IQ to be a wordsum of 9, same as income.

I bet the alcohol point is insightful. I also wonder about the relationship between IQ and lying on polls.

[Kirk]

What are the colors in the charts supposed to mean? And how is the wordsum test administered?

[SFG]

The colors indicate frequency relative to what would be expected by chance: blue is less, red is more. darker colors mean more deviation from chance. kind of a hot-cold scale.

you can see the wordsum question on the GSS site.

[spungen]

I can think of other possibilities. For one, smart people marry later in life. So, the smart people in this pool are probably older than the lower-scoring (on WORDSUM) ones. You made the age cutoff 39, but I would guess short-term sexual partnering drops off long before that. The question only asks about zero, one, or two partners in the last year, nothing about length of relationship. A 20-year-old would be a lot more likely to have a one-night stand than a 30-year-old would.

No. 1 makes sense, but probably not for the entire difference between zero and one. One would take precautions and wait a little more time, not forego sex entirely. Maybe a smart guy would be less likely to pay a pro -- I'm assuming that counts as a "partner."

As for No. 2, do anyone's personal observations bear that out? Mine don't. I'm curious about your marital statistics; could that, also, be because smart people tend to be married older?

No. 3 doesn't sound plausible. As you kind of pointed out to SFG, even assuming there are smart-geek subcultures of men with whom women don't have sex, how big a portion is this of the total smart population? Also, why would smart people be less attractive *to each other*? It may be, though, that smart people desire similar partners and have more difficulty just bc of their smaller numbers. There are logistical issues due to being a scattered minority.

Is there any way to compare geographic regions? For instance, I was surprised to find a much more conservative attitude toward sex from educated young guys in the Atlantic and D.C. areas than in California. Like, a guy just wouldn't graduate from any California college, good or bad, without having had sex, unless something was seriously wrong with him, beyond just being geeky and not particularly attractive.

[Peter]

Like, a guy just wouldn't graduate from any California college, good or bad, without having had sex, unless something was seriously wrong with him, beyond just being geeky and not particularly attractive.

I can't believe that. If he's nerdy, or introverted, or unathletic, or overweight, or just not sufficiently Alpha, he's not getting any sex, regardless of the fact that it's California. Some things apply everywhere.

[The Superfluous Man]

Think twice about celebrating nerds - see this (http://www.udolpho.com/weblog/?id=00712&title=Why-you-should-never-listen-to-geeks-and-in-fact-should-despise-them) and the link at the bottom.

I work around these people. A depressing cesspool, the lot of them.

[spungen]

Superfluous, that was hilarious. I think that my understanding of what constitutes a nerd or geek must be broader than some, like Peter's. There may be a small, hard-core, involuntarily celebate subculture of men with which I'm probably not familiar. Rather than just most guys who are engineers or like computers, or watched Star Trek and played D&D when they were young. The single guys I know who do that fantasy/collectible stuff frequently connect with women that way.

For instance, my husband laughed at SFG's "dagger divided by two" example. Yet, while he did not have nearly as much premarital sex as he would have preferred (most guys don't), two a year was not a challenge. I still suspect that sex may be less pervasive in other geographic regions. Perhaps smarter men enjoy a "trickle-down" effect in California.

[AG]

Smarter people have less sex. No matter whatever reason. This just fits Rushon Theory very well.

[Joseph Hertzlinger]

I suspect that Wordsum test measures a combination of IQ and something else, possibly having too much free time.

People with too much free time are less likely to be married or in a "relationship," less likely to have children (especially adolescents), and less likely to have a productive job (thereby accounting for the mysterious lack of correlation between Wordsum scores and income).

[Hope]

Premaial sex is wrong you cant justify wrong!Doesn't mean just because you did particpate in premarital sex its right !!!! Or just because everyone else did it it's right.

I don't mean to barge in on your conversation. After reading this, I think these comments are deceiving. Every woman and man has hormones that God created and each person, when married, have a right to experience what He created. It doens't matter how smart a person is, what matters is understanding eachother and knowing what love really is. This is a selfish argument. It sounds like as if sex only belongs to certain people and that is wrong. We are all equal in God's eyes no matter how big, tall or skinny we are.