What Your Sexual Fantasies Say About Your Personality

Your reading, watching, and listening habits might reveal a lot about your personality type (at least, that’s according to a 2011 paper).

And newer research published in the scientific journal PLOS One has suggested that your sexual fantasies might be surprisingly revealing, too.

The authors of the study compared 5,225 adults’ self-reported frequency and variety of fantasies with the Big Five personality traits.

This is a psychological framework that defines five broad personality measures, namely:

• Openness, or how imaginative, curious, and receptive to new experiences a person is.
• Conscientiousness, or how reliable, organised, and goal-oriented someone may be.
• Extraversion, or how much somebody likes being social and whether or not they draw energy from being with other people.
• Agreeableness, or how likely an individual is to get along with others and express empathy and sympathy.
• Neuroticism, or how anxious, depressed, stressed, or worried a person tends to be.

The new paper found that the more sexual fantasies someone said they had, the more neurotic they typically were. People who experienced more negative emotions also experienced more sexual disgust.

Meanwhile, people who were highly conscientious and agreeable were less likely to report sexual fantasies “across exploratory, intimate, impersonal, and sadomasochistic domains,” the researchers added.

Conscientiousness seemed to be the biggest indicator of fantasy frequency, too; the more of the trait someone had, the fewer fantasies overall they usually had.

Agreeableness seemed to have the second-highest effect, with more agreeable people also having fewer fantasies on average.

The study suggested that people who fall into these groups “might be less likely to engage in fantasies that are non-traditional, bridge social norms, or simulate consensual aggression”.

Being extroverted and open-minded, meanwhile, “showed minimal relationships” with how often participants had sexual fantasies.

This study only showed a link, not a cause. In other words, we can’t even say that the traits led to the frequency or type of fantasy, never mind why.

Still, the researchers have floated some theories. For instance, they suggest that conscientious and agreeable people might “be less likely to sexually fantasise because of their respect for norms and others”.

They suggested those with a higher sense of responsibility “are likely to moralise themselves and others and avoid sexual thinking (and maybe sex) altogether”.

Because depression was so highly associated with higher sexual fantasy frequency in this study, while anxiety and emotional volatility weren’t, the scientists noted this could bolster existing research that suggests thoughts like these might work as a form of emotional regulation.

“Those more prone to negative emotionality were also those most likely to sexually fantasise, possibly as a way to have more positive cognitions,” they added.

And they noted the lack of association between openness and sexual fantasy frequency or nature was “a bit surprising”, given previous research which suggested otherwise.