Evaluations of Sexually Active Men and Women Under Divided Attention: A Social Cognitive Approach to the Sexual Double Standard

Past research on the sexual double standard has generally shown that both men and women are evaluated similarly, not differently, for engaging in high levels of sexual activity. However, the settings in which this research has taken place may have allowed participants to devote almost all of their cognitive resources to the task of evaluating sexually active men and women. Devoting one's full attention to person evaluation may lead to individuation instead of stereotyping. This article reports a study designed to test the hypothesis that when attention is divided, people will evaluate men with many partners more favorably than women with many partners. Participants, under conditions of divided or full attention, evaluated male or female target persons with 1, 7, or 19 sexual partners. Participants in the divided attention condition exhibited a sexual double standard, whereas participants in the full attention condition did not.