

Reframing Sexting as a Positive Relationship Behavior [pdf] - galapago
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/reframing-sexting.pdf

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Animats
_" Leveraging a novel Internet platform (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to recruit
heterosexual adults" ..._

This is another one of those low-end studies where somebody put a psych
questionnaire on Mechanical Turk because it was easy. The joke in psych used
to be that psychology was the study of grad students, because they were easily
available for study and so many studies used them. Now it's people who have
free time and few skills trying to make money on Mechanical Turk.

~~~
Kalium
The joke I've heard is that college freshman are the best-studied demographic
in America.

~~~
RodericDay
It's more than just a joke. UBC Researchers made a bit of a splash a while
back meta-studying the studies of "WEIRD" people
([http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf)).

> Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples
> from Western societies are regularly published. Are such
> species‐generalizing claims justified? This review suggests not only
> substantial variability in experimental results across populations in basic
> domains, but that standard subjects are unusual compared with the rest of
> the species— outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception,
> fairness, spatial reasoning, moral reasoning, thinking‐styles, and self ‐
> concepts. This suggests (1) caution in addressing questions of human nature
> from this slice of humanity, and (2) that understanding human psychology
> will require broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address
> these challenges.

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wanderfowl
Willingness to sext (and candor to discuss it) is probably just standing in
for open and positive views on sex, and/or the presence of a vigorous and
passionate sex life.

Although I appreciate the evidence that the sexting isn't _harmful_ to
relationships, I think this study is basically stating "People with healthy
sexual relationships often have healthy overall relationships. (p = Duh.)"

~~~
samstave
> __ _" Willingness to sext (and candor to discuss it) is probably just
> standing in for open and positive views on sex, and/or the presence of a
> vigorous and passionate sex life."_ __

Totally!

Candidly; I sext a LOT. It ___IS_ __a skill such as foreplay... I only mesh
well with others who have the same propensity for sexting. Also - I am 40, and
those with whom I sext are in my age range + /-5 years...

It is not a young thing by any means. It is also not a new thing.

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JoeAltmaier
Misleading? Satisfaction is correlated with sexting, in some demographics.
Nothing about relationship quality but that.

~~~
gertef
What's misleading?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
"Positive relationship behavior". They only showed an increase in one
partner's satisfaction. E.g. perhaps cheating could have caused their
satisfaction to increase - would cheating then be a "Positive relationship
behavior"?

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neoCrimeLabs
Wait, sexting isn't considered a positive relationship behaviour?

(Edit: Assuming all parties involved are consenting adults.)

~~~
fweespeech
I know a number of folks who think sexting is:

A) Weird

B) Perverted

C) A good way to have your sex life plastered over the internet.

D) A good way for the NSA and cell phone provider to know all about your sex
life.

~~~
neoCrimeLabs
A) Purely subjective opinion. Actually a study published in The Journal of
Sexual Medicine in Sept 2014 (IIRC), sought to define what true sexual
deviation was. The results found that many things considered sexual deviations
in popular culture are actually not that un-common in reality.

B) See A. You say this like it's a bad thing.

C) The fact that this is true doesn't make it good or bad. One person's
nightmare, is another's acceptable risk, is another's pleasure.

D) See C. As a side note: If the NSA spends countless dollars cataloging
private citizens sexual interests rather than protecting United States
security, then there are much much larger issues to worry about. (And frankly,
there probably are)

Edited to fix typos and spelling issues.

~~~
fweespeech
I didn't say it was my opinion, so not sure why you are trying for a rebuttal.

But as long as a significant number of people feel that way, it has a social
impact.

