What Drives Us to Sext?

High-schoolers do it. College students do it. Stars do it. Politicians do it. Martha Stewart does it, for God’s sake! No matter how many horror stories we see in the media about people whose partners decided to share their private text messages and images, we’re all pretty much still at it. Last year, a poll by Lookout, a security company, reported that one in every five smartphone users send sexually explicit messages. Why do we persist?

A paper published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking offers answers — which will surprise absolutely nobody. The expectation of a positive outcome is sufficient to drive people to risky behavior.

“The researchers suggest that positive expectations about the outcome of sexting may drive the behavior, prompting the individual to overlook possible consequences in favor of the potential rush of exhilaration that may accompany doing something with a bit of social danger attached to it,” writes Krystal D’Costa on a piece on Scientific American blogs. “In the positive domain, sexting can make a sender feel excited and sexy. It can also make a recipient feel confident, admired, and wanted. These are all powerful feelings that can serve as dis-inhibitory agents and minimize stigma surrounding the act. The most commonly identified negative expectation reported was that sexting may cause you to feel embarrassed. Additionally, shame, awkwardness, and disgust were also listed as negative expectations for both senders and recipients. However, given the culture of sharing that is gaining ground, our threshold for embarrassment may be increasing, which could account for why the positive expectations remains fairly consistent when compared to the negative expectations in guiding behavior.”

The study did touch on something very surprising though: unmarried couples that live together seem to sext more than married couples do. (Like we need any more reasons to be terrified of the institution.)

Header image by Michele Ursino.