Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

Theresa Regli

Follow Theresa on Twitter @TheresaRegli

Classifying why we have sex

26-Aug-2007

Tags: Enterprise Search, Information Architecture

Like great bottles of wine or legendary concert performances, there are occasional taxonomy projects I hear about after the fact that I'm very sorry I missed. Recently in The New York Times, society and science columnist John Tierney reflected on the results of a taxonomy project at the University of Texas that attempted to classify all the reasons why people have sex.

And you thought it was tough to get the Marketing and IT teams to speak the same language and classify content the same way? This taxonomy classifies the motivations for one act in 237 different ways, from "help me fall asleep," "make my partner feel powerful," "burn calories," "return a favor," "hurt an enemy" or my personal favorite, having lived through many cold New England winters, "to keep warm."

Admittedly, having just spent much of the steamy, hot summer developing our new training course on Information Organisation & Access, this piqued my interest as a late-breaking case study worthy of our upcoming classes.

Lest you think I'm just randomly attempting to spice up the CMS Watch blog, this taxonomy project is interesting for a number of reasons, both from a methodological and social standpoint. While you shouldn't need any further justification for user-centered design, this project employed many time-proven methods, such as a user survey to gather information (asking 400 people to freely write down all the reasons why they'd have sex) and user-driven relevance ranking (once all the motivations for having sex were collected, a different, larger set of people was asked to rank which apply the most frequently).

Not surprisingly, the latter results varied based on the person; as we might have guessed, men and women classify their motivations for sex very differently. I was especially pleased to see that the results contradicted one stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources. In fact, based on the results of the relevance ranking exercise, men attempt to use women to gain social status more often than the other way around. Or, maybe most women's comparative lack of braggadocio makes them wise enough to not admit when they do. That's no surprise to some of us, anyway. But the point here is, real data matters more than abstract categorizations and assumptions.

Researchers Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss should consider their final hierarchy -- which bucketed all 237 motivations into four general categories, a serious analytic accomplishment. Those categories are:

• Physical: "The person had beautiful eyes," or "a desirable body," or "too physically attractive to resist."
• Goal Attainment: "I wanted to break up a rival's relationship," or "be popular," or "because of a bet." And yes, for some, even the goal to have children.
• Emotional: "I wanted to communicate at a deeper level," or "lift my partner's spirits," or "because the person was intelligent."
• Insecurity: "I felt like it was my duty," or "I wanted to boost my self-esteem," or "It was the only way my partner would spend time with me."

Kudos to the researchers / taxonomists. Now, when can we get our text mining and search tools to cluster content so accurately? Slowly, but surely, they're getting there -- as we discuss in our IOA courses and upcoming edition of the Enterprise Search Report.