Men Cheat Due to Stronger Sexual Desires

Men indulge in extra-marital affairs because they have stronger sexual impulses and not because they have weak self-control, a new study has found.

Previous research has shown that men are more likely to cheat on their partners than women. However, nobody could explain why men, across countries, had this tendency. One theory suggests that men have weaker self-control than women, which is why they tend to cheat more. Another possible explanation is that men have stronger sexual impulses than women.

The new study, conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University and colleagues supports the idea that men have stronger sexual urges.

"Overall, these studies suggest that men are more likely to give in to sexual temptations because they tend to have stronger sexual impulse strength than women do," said Natasha Tidwell, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University, who authored the study, according to a news release. 

"But when people exercise self-control in a given situation, this sex difference in behavior is greatly reduced. It makes sense that self-control, which has relatively recent evolutionary origins compared to sexual impulses, would work similarly - and as effectively - for both men and women," Tidwell added.

The study included 218 participants from the United States, of which 148 were women.

Participants were asked to recall and describe a person of the opposite sex, who was currently unavailable. They then answered a series of questionnaires that were designed to measure their sexual impulses and their attempts at controlling their behavior.

Experts found that dwelling on a possible sexual relationship with an "off-limits" person increased sexual urges in men than in women.

"When men reflected on their past sexual behavior, they reported experiencing relatively stronger impulses and acting on those impulses more than women did," said Tidwell.

However, both men and women had same levels of self-control. Researchers said that when the self-control mechanism fails, men tend to give in to their stronger sexual impulses, which results in cheating.

In another part of the study, scientists looked at sexual impulses of women and men. For this experiment, they recruited 600 undergraduates (326 men, 274 women). All the participants were asked to play a "partner selection game."

In the game, they were shown a series of photos of attractive and non-attractive people on a computer screen. The images were tagged with prompts that read "good for you" or "bad for you". Participants were asked to select partners based on the prompts. In some cases, the computer asked people to choose ugly people as potential partners and reject the attractive ones.

Researchers noted that men were more likely to hesitate rejecting an attractive partner.

The study is published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Historically, the man has been the cheating spouse. However, recent data has suggested that in America, the gender gap in cheating is narrowing. Also, women in the U.S are 40 percent more likely to be cheating on their partners now than in 1990s.