Researchers from Brunel University in the UK are literally crunching data when it comes to women who experience slut shaming. Their study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, explores what they call the female economic dependence theory.

“Previous researchers have attempted to explain why different types of mating systems [and] behaviors (monogamy versus polygyny or promiscuity) have emerged in different human societies, often with emphasis on the role of environment and parental investment — and our research was, in general complementary to these approaches,” researchers wrote. “However, our work is unique in many of its predictions and in its focus on moral attitudes about promiscuity.” Parental investment refers to the time and energy men give to their offspring.

Since investment is not an obligation, men do so more when they’re certain (paternity certainty) their offspring is their own; the lower the uncertainty, the more likely men will invest. This would mean both men and women should be more averse to promiscuity, in part because the cost of promiscuity will increase with female dependence on male parental investment. When women financially depend on men, this investment is considered more valuable.

So researchers recruited over 600 adults ages 18 to 80 in the United States to study the effects of this economic dependence on an individual and state level. The first survey established perceived economic dependence, the wrongness of promiscuity, and religious and political commitment by asking questions, like: Most women I know depend heavily on the money of a male parenter, or probably will at some point, Promiscuous (men and women) are not worthy of much respect, and How would you describe yourself on a 1-5 scale of liberal to conservative?

The results showed perceived female economic dependence could moderately predict how opposed men and women were to promiscuity. While the second survey was conducted on a larger, state level, including 4, 533 participants of the same ages, it was conducted similarly. The only addition, thanks to the U.S. Census Bureua’s 2011 American Community Survey, was income of a male and female’s self and partner — and the results still showed wrongness of promiscuity was strongly positively related to perceived female economic dependence. In fact, this association was greater on a state than individual level.

“Anti-promiscuity morality was higher among men and women who perceived high female economic dependence among women in their social network, even after controlling for relationships between one’s anti-promiscuity morality and one’s age, sex, religiosity, political conservatism, and the anti-promiscuity views of geographical neighbors,” researchers explained.

All this has to do with the continually evolving mating strategies, be it monogamy, promiscuity, or something else entirely. Researchers added they’ll need to conduct additional research in order to shed more light on the psychological mechanisms that underlie this association.

“Humans are group-oriented and moralistic organisms, and, as conservative and religiously moral systems tend to oppose promiscuity, it is not surprising that members of these groups also tend to oppose it,” researchers concluded. “A more interesting issue is how these moral systems become so opposed to promiscuity in the first place.”

Source: Price M.E., Pound N, Scott I.M. Female Economic Depending and the Morality of Promiscuity. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2014.