Category: Factual
& Arts TV
Date: 16.07.2005
Printable version
Almost half a million people have logged online to take
part in a survey testing men and women's personality traits, cognitive
abilities, sexual attitudes and behaviours and mate preferences for
a new series The Secrets of the Sexes
starting on BBC ONE on Sunday at 9.00pm.
In the part of the survey designed to measure attitudes
to sex and love, 47 per cent of men indicated that they would need to
feel some form of attachment before sex, compared to 69 per cent of
women; whilst 24 per cent of women said they did not need to feel attachment
before sex, compared to 45 per cent of men.
Men appear to be more romantic than women, with 67 per
cent saying they believe in love at first sight, compared to 64 per
cent of women.
Men are also more 'sexually optimistic' - when asked
how many sexual partners they believed they would have in the next five
years men believed they would have almost double the number that women
anticipated (3.4 to 1.9).
The survey also revealed that high earners of both
genders have a higher sex drive but only the high earning men actually
have more sex.
Men and women participating ranked 23 traits for attractiveness;
men's top five in order were: intelligence, overall looks, humour, honesty
and facial attractiveness; women's were humour, honesty, intelligence,
kindness and values.
In cognitive tests in the survey men who took part
consistently performed better than women in tests designed to measure
visuo-spatial awareness, whilst women participating performed better
at tests designed to measure verbal fluency and object location.
Just over a fifth of men participating (21 per cent)
appeared to have 'female' brains i.e. better than the average woman
at 'female' tasks, and vice versa for women (21 per cent).
Results from the BBC survey have been analysed by academic
researchers and will be published in scientific journals.
People can participate in the survey and find out the
'sex' of their brain by logging onto bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex.
