To tinker with an old cliche, "When the going gets tough, the tough have sex."
Apparently, when the environment changes for the worse, men change their mating strategies to be more promiscuous. When men face situations that have a low survival likelihood, their commitment to monogamy decreases. This was tested by Omri Gillath at the University of Kansas, who asked men to think about their own deaths and then showed them sexual pictures. The men had higher interest in the pictures when thinking about their deaths than they did when Gillath asked them to think about dental pain.
"We're biologically wired to reproduce, and the environment tells us the best strategy to use to make sure our genes are passed on," said Gillath. "If you think you might die soon, there's a huge advantage for a man to use short-term mating strategies — to make sure there are a bunch of offspring and hope that some of them survive — but women can't do the same thing.
Gillath connected his findings to the current toilet bowl economy, which some economists predict will bring about a long term period of low employment and lower standard of living. He suggests that the worsening living conditions may cause men to cheat more.
"When the environment is secure and you have enough food and things are working the way you would like them to, people are more likely to invest in their existing kids and stay with their current partner or prefer long-term mating strategies. But if the environment is dangerous and your chances of survival are low — if there is a famine or more enemies— then people will adopt short-term strategies which allow them to reproduce more."
Blogger Opinion:
I can see the logic in this but it makes me think of the "Sexual Healing" episode of South Park. At the end of the episode, Kyle and Butters learn that men just like sex a lot and come up with excuses to have affairs. Evolutionary psychology claims that men cheat with younger women because they are more fertile. They cheat during hard times because they need to have more children. Rich men cheat more because they can afford to. At the end of the day, we are really just whores and that is coming from a whore.
Source:
http://www.science20.com/news_articles/evolutionary_psychology_bad_economy_means_more_sex_men-83588
