RADNOR TOWNSHIP, PA — Patrick Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University, along with his wife, Charlotte Markey, also a psychologist out of Rutgers University, recently surveyed more than 200 adults about social tendencies that can make a person a bit more slutty. It turns out that the number of partners a person has is less reliant on looks, dress, or prowess than it is on social behavior. The study volunteers were checked for their interpersonal abilities, but they also had to indicate how many people they had engaged with in sexual encounters.Friendly people express their friendly tendencies by being friendly between the sheets, while those who are more socially dominant and aggressive use sex as a way to sleep around and not be involved in a monogamous relationship, according to the Markeys.

“It’s particularly interesting that warm people tend to be promiscuous, because in some ways, it conflicts with the moral thinking that promiscuity is bad. While sleeping with multiple partners certainly carries with it certain health risks, it could be that someone’s not doing it to achieve the most pleasure. Someone actually might be doing it as an expression of their warmth to other people,” Patrick Markey told LiveScience. “A warm person might hug lots of people; a warm person might kiss lots of people. Well, maybe a warm person might sleep with lots of people.”

The responses of volunteers underlined dominance as a main factor in promiscuity, but people who were either extremely friendly or extremely cold toward the rest of the people displayed the same tendency, while those moderately warm were the category with the fewest number of sexual partners.

“Antagonistic people might prefer to have multiple sex partners in order to avoid being in a monogamous relationship, out of fear of being poorly treated or being later rejected by a committed partner,” the Markeys noted in their study.