Social Psychology and the Study of Sexual Behavior

Past research on sexual behavior may be viewed as a progressive evolution from less taboo concerns (animal behavior, studies of primitive cultures, and abnormality) to the succession of "shocks" that attended the extension of sexual knowledge to the normal, contemporary human sphere with Freud, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson. Social psychologists were attracted to this area by the revolutionary societal changes in attitudinal permissiveness and in actual behavior, by the research initiated by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and by a pressing applied interest in solving the problems of unwanted and unneeded conception. Sex research is of special value to our field because it has built-in experimental impact, its technology includes the direct nonverbal assessment of a motivational-emotional state, and it is of obvious relevance to innumerable real- life issues. Upon examination, many of the traditional principles and research paradigms of social-personality psychologists may be perceived as being directly relevant to an understanding of sexuality. A tentative model of a social psychological approach to this research domain (the Sexual Behavior Sequence) is presented. Finally, the interdisciplinary and international aspects of sex research are noted.