Articles — Understanding Sociosexuality & the SOI-R
In-depth, citation-backed guides on sociosexual orientation — what it is, how the validated SOI-R measures it, and what decades of research reveal about desire, attraction, jealousy, and commitment.
How Stable Is Sociosexual Orientation Over a Lifetime?
Is your sociosexual orientation fixed or can it change? What personality science says about the stability of the trait across the lifespan.
Sociosexuality and Attachment Styles: How They Relate
How attachment styles — secure, anxious, and avoidant — relate to sociosexual orientation and the three SOI-R facets, and what the research does (and does not) show.
Sociosexuality in Men vs. Women: What the Cross-Cultural Data Shows
Why men tend to score more unrestricted than women on average, how large the overlap is, and what a 48-nation study revealed about culture and sociosexuality.
SOI-R Scoring Explained: How the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory Is Calculated
A clear, step-by-step guide to scoring the SOI-R: the three facets, the reverse-coded item, and how your numbers map onto the restricted–unrestricted spectrum.
Restricted vs. Unrestricted Sociosexuality: What the Spectrum Really Means
What it means to be sexually restricted or unrestricted, where the labels come from, and why sociosexual orientation is a spectrum rather than two boxes.
SOI-R vs. the Original SOI: Why the Revised Inventory Replaced It
How the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory–Revised (SOI-R) differs from Simpson & Gangestad's original 1991 SOI, and why researchers adopted the three-facet version.
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