Inductivist

 A recent post focused on racial differences in psychopathy, and while people know the obvious connection between being a psychopath and committing crimes, few realize that the correlation between a promiscuous lifestyle and psychopathy is about as strong.  In fact, a lifestyle of casual sex is one criterion for diagnosing psychopathic personality.  Evolutionary psychologists have developed the concept of sociosexuality, which refers to an interest in non-committal sex. The correlation between sociosexuality and psychopathy is roughly 0.4, an impressive number.  It's strong enough that factor analysis would probably reveal one supertrait that underlies psychopathy, criminality, and sociosexuality--a syndrome we could call exploitativeness.

So, are there racial and ethnic differences in sociosexuality or exploitativeness (as indicated by high sociosexuality)?  The General Social Survey does have one item used in sociosexuality inventories--the number of sexual partners since age 18.  Let's pick an arbitrary cutoff--25+ partners--to indicate exploitativeness.  For now, I will focus on men and will limit analysis to ethnic groups with at least 50 respondents (sample size = 10,789):

Percent with 25+ sexual partners since age 18

Black  24.3
Scottish  19.8
Spanish  19.7
Jewish  19.1
American Indian  18.2
Greek  18.2
Italian  16.6
Puerto Rican  15.7
Other Spanish  14.9
Norwegian  14.6
Irish  14.4

Percent for total sample  14.1

Russian  13.9
French  13.5
English/Welsh  12.9
Austrian  11.5
Polish  11.4
German  11.2
French Canadian  10.2
Swedish  10.1
Dutch  9.9
Mexican  8.7
Danish  8.2
Czech  7.8
Asian Indian  4.1
Filipino  3.3
Chinese  0.0

You can see that by selecting a cutoff of 25 partners, this gives us 14.1% of US men being exploitative.  More importantly for this post, we see tremendous diversity in this trait.  Almost one-quarter of black men are exploitative compared to ZERO Chinese men.  Looking at general patterns, Southern Europeans tend to have higher numbers, while Asians fall to the bottom.  These patterns are consistent with numbers presented in Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality.  He found high psychopathy among blacks and American Indians, moderate levels among whites, and low levels among Asians.

Lance Welton at Unz.com does a nice job of summarizing Richard Lynn's brand new book Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality

I won't repeat Lance's points, but I see in the comments that some people are claiming that the racial differences are explained in terms of the environment. This, of course, is the standard explanation--the only one you will get in sociology class, if the instructor is honest enough to acknowledge that the group differences indeed exist.

There are two obvious reasons to think the racial gaps (psychopathy running from high to low in this order: black, Native American, Hispanic, white, Asian) are at least partially due to genetic differences: 1) the differences are basically universal–found historically (Lynn cites over 700 studies conducted from the 19th century to now) and all around the world, and 2) psychopathy is highly heritable, similar to general intelligence. Therapists find it practically impossible to treat.

As Arthur Jensen explained, it is reasonable to conclude that if genes explain 70% of the variation in a trait, they likely explain 70% of group differences. The only reason why the commonsense belief that “What You See is What You Get” is not popular today but “People Are Not Themselves But Their Surroundings” is assumed to be true is that we have been propagandized by armies of full-time storytellers for more than a century.

I do take issue with conceptualizing psychopathy as a disorder, as if human nature is naturally good, and antisociality suggests a brain that is not working properly. I’m not criticizing Lynn but psychiatry. Exploitativeness is a regrettable but perfectly healthy and natural supertrait.  Psychiatrists want to turn all problematic behaviors into forms of mental illness, which is just silly. Evolution has designed us to thrive and to be strong, not to be burdened on every side by illness and weakness.  Mainstream behavioral science portrays us--the descendants of nature's winners--as naturally frail.  Complete BS.