The last study replicated the second (which included heterosexual participants), but with a larger sample of individuals that included gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents.
According to the findings:
The three most common regrets for women, in descending order, were: losing their virginity to the wrong partner (24 percent), cheating on a present or past partner (23 percent) and moving too fast sexually (20 percent).
For men, the top three regrets were, in descending order: being too shy to make a move on a prospective sexual partner (27 percent), not being more sexually adventurous when young (23 percent) and not being more sexually adventurous during their single days (19 percent).
While rates of actually engaging in casual sex were similar overall among participants (56 percent total), women reported more frequent and more intense regrets about it.
Comparing gay men and lesbian women, and bisexual men and bisexual women, a similar pattern held — women tended to regret casual sexual actions more than men did.
None of the 39 sexual-action regrets ranked by participants were statistically more common for men than for women, and only one of the 30 sexual-inaction regrets was more common for women than for men.
Many factors may be at work, the researchers conceded, but evolutionary pressures may well be at the root of them.
"We do not doubt that social norms, such as a sexual 'double standard,' play a major role in sexual regret," said lead author Andrew Galperin, who worked on the project before completing his Ph.D. in psychology at UCLA in 2012. "But these norms themselves might have roots in the ancient selection pressures shaping women's and men's minds."
"One thing that is fascinating about these emotional reactions in the present is that they are often far removed from the reproductive consequences of the ancestral past," Haselton said. "For example, we have reliable methods of contraception. But that doesn't seem to have erased the sex differences in women's and men's responses, which have a deep evolutionary history."
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