Evolution, Sex, and Gender, Not to Mention Research

According to the study:

. If a self-enhancing presentation (e.g., conformity to gender role norms) is inconsistent with one's true attitudes and behavior (e.g., deviance from gender role norms), an individual who gives self-enhancing responses risks being detected as lying or as lacking self-awareness. The bogus pipeline method motivates individuals to eschew self-enhancement in favor of honest and accurate answers to avoid embarrassment (Sabini, Siepmann, & Stein, 2001).

Basically the thought of being embarrsed by getting caught lying feels worse then the thought of admitting a high number of sexual partners. You don't need a lie detector that's 100% accurate to trigger that effect.

I'd expect college students to be more likely to have heard that even real lie detectors aren't accurate.

Sure, but "more likely" here means a base rate of maybe 1% instead of a base rate of maybe 0.1%. Either way, the fact that they even mentioned lie detection is likely to scare people into telling the truth whether or not they believe (as opposed to alieve) that lie detectors work.

They ask you at the end if you thought the experiment was real or if you thought the researchers fibbed. Then they exclude the ones who weren't fooled.

Thank you Alicorn, it was exactly that (although I learned of its existence from a different source than Lesswrong).

Well, the study has its limits, and this could be another one of them, so as I said it's far from conclusive. However, in this particular case, I wonder if the kind of entertainment that you indicate really nudges young adults sexuality or limits to expose a widely known but denied truth (in Italy we say "Punchinello's secret", also when someone declares that he has discovered something that everybody else knew very well in advance, it's said that he has "discovered hot water").
I'm thinking for example of pornographic movies, that exist since the beginning of cinematography, and it's not that the women were particularly forced to star in them... Of course not even this is strong evidence, though it's still something.
In my opinion, the biggest piece of evidence in favor of women's promiscuity are sperm wars.

What do you mean by "equally promiscuous"? Do you mean that women and men have the same average number of sex partners?

Yes, of course.

Than this follows from basic arithmetic and I don't see why this study is relevant.

Why everybody keep saying this? It's true only if the group surveyed is closed under the "sexual partnership" relation, which is hardly the case in any study.
An extreme example: a population of 10 men and 10 women, in which all the women have sex with just one man. Then in any group not closed under sexual partnerhsip the average for women is always 1 and for men is always 0, correctly indicating that women are more promiscuous than men.
The average is trivially equal only if the group is extended to the whole population, but in that case the average is not a good indicator of promiscuity (see the above example).
The study is indeed interesting because there are bound to be asymmetries, and it shows that they are skewed towards women.

Do you mean that women and men have the same average number of sex partners? Than this follows from basic arithmetic and I don't see why this study is relevant.

And yet the previous studies found otherwise, and were interpreted as confirming that men are more promiscuous than women.

but reporters frequently -don't-, and treat it like it's accurate

That kind of stuff happens with everything. I no longer consider reporters any more reliable than word-of-mouth.

Given the way memory works, people probably remember only the number they want to believe and a vague idea of which way they're biasing it. So when presented with a "lie detector" they try to compensate for their bias and wind up overcompensating.

In most such studies, women report drastically lower sex partnerships than men (2 to 12 partners, for one study I recall from memory and may be dramatically misremembering so don't take my numbers too seriously). This study is actually interesting in that the numbers of the lie-detected class of respondents are pretty close.

Granted. But such distortions aren't exactly prevalent in society, which has a near 1:1 gender ratio, and relatively insignificant departure rates (they're going to be less than the error margin in any honestly-conducted study).

In the Cracked article I first saw this in (can't say if OrphanWilde got it from elsewhere) they admitted that there could be a gender ratio imbalance (they also pointed out that homosexuals exist) but noted that the evidence was being interpreted strictly as evidence for promiscuous males. (And ... whatever the opposite of promiscuous is ... females.)

That objections disappears if you assume an equal gender ratio in the population at large, which is usually the case.

Isn't the usual explanation that "having had a lot of partners" is seen as a positive trait for a man, but a negative one for a woman? (or at least, it's a more desirable/less undesirable trait for a male).

Can't see why men would have a wider view of what counts than women, though; I'd expect the reverse.

In a How I Met Your Mother episode, Znefunyy pbhagrq jung Yvyl qvq jvgu ure rk-oblsevraq nf frk naq Yvyl qvqa'g. (Znefunyy punatrq uvf zvaq ol gur raq bs gur rcvfbqr.)

(Yeah, fictional evidence, I know...)

I am totally willing to believe that men and women count different things as sex, but they could both be using the same standard - "times a partner makes me orgasm" - and it could still result in a greater mean number of acts for men than for women even in a fixed heterosexual population (unfortunately)... granted I have no idea if people do this.

Society sees a man who has sex with a lot of women as being good with woman. Society sees a woman who has sex with a lot of men as being a slut.

A woman doesn't want to see herself as a slut and might therefore use a more conservative way of counting.

(and quite a few that can't)

Like what?

Indeed, psychologists generated this hypothesis and tried to make a survey not biased against prostitutes. Their survey found no imbalance.

But it cannot both be true that this study and the lie detector study both explain the discrepancy. It could be that both effects are true, but there are unaccounted biases in the other direction (such as age). The fact that both studies claim the same size effect, the size of the error that they are trying to explain, makes me highly suspicious of the claimed magnitudes. The psychologists got the answers they wanted. How sketchy is this research? Par for the psychology course.

so that the amount of sex that each gender wants because of an internal drive is quite different.

"Because of sexual desire" would perhaps be more accurate. The internal drive for acquiring resources is rather ubiquitous and powerful. It plays a significant part in certain long term mating strategies as well as prostitution and is also not all that different than the drives for status affiliations that have such a strong influence on other sexual and social behaviors. The cases where a distinction based on lack of internal drive comes clearly into play are with such things as sex slaves and rape.

If you're counting unique partnerships rather than acts, around 30-50%. Study here; analysis of some of the flaws by a retired whore here. There is, unfortunately, a lot of educated-guesswork involved, criminalization being what it is.

NSFW, obviously. Well, those specific links are probably okay, but the site as a whole isn't unless you have a very understanding boss.

Other extreme outliers could also skew the data; cultural stereotypes say that it's easier for women to be an extremely promiscuous outlier regardless of whether they're doing so by being a prostitute.

Luke pointed out some other potential divergence points, such as departure rates (death/emigration). There's also the potential issue that the subset queried may be divergent from the population as a whole; as a non-descriptive example, male college students may have a lot of sex with female non-college students, and female college students strictly have sex with male college students; if you're querying college students, you could get largely divergent numbers.

But if your numbers are largely divergent, they're probably wrong.