Social Media Linked to Openness to Sugar Relationships, But Culture Sets the Rules

A sweeping analysis of more than 22,000 women across 22 countries has found that heavier social media use is associated with greater openness to so-called sugar relationships—arrangements in which intimacy or sexual involvement is exchanged for material or financial support from an older, wealthier partner. Crucially, the strength of that association was not the same everywhere. The link was modestly stronger in countries with looser social norms, where deviations from convention are tolerated more readily, and weaker in culturally tighter nations where norms are strictly enforced. The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is among the first to test how individual digital exposure and country-level normative climates interact in shaping attitudes toward sexual-economic exchange.

The research team, led by Norbert Meskó and colleagues, drew on a large publicly available cross-national dataset on romantic love and mate preferences originally collected by Kowal and colleagues, which surveyed 117,293 participants in 175 countries. After screening for complete responses on the key measures, restricting the analysis to women, and keeping only countries with at least 100 respondents, the final analytic sample comprised 22,292 women from 22 countries. The focus on women reflects the structurally gender-asymmetric nature of sugar relationships, in which men more often occupy the resource-provider role and women the recipient role, meaning that women’s openness to such arrangements reflects psychologically distinct processes.

Openness was measured with the younger women’s version of the Acceptance of Sugar Relationships in Young Women and Men Scale, a five-point questionnaire assessing attitudinal willingness to receive material resources from an older, wealthier partner in exchange for intimacy. The researchers stress that openness is an attitude, not a behavior: it captures whether such arrangements seem acceptable, imaginable, or personally viable, without implying actual participation. This distinction matters because attitudes can precede but never guarantee behavior, and because people may encounter relationship models online without endorsing or enacting them.

The theoretical backdrop is the concept of cultural tightness–looseness, which describes how clearly social norms are defined, how strongly they are enforced, and how severely deviations are sanctioned within a country. In tighter societies, norm violations carry higher social costs; in looser ones, greater behavioral latitude prevails. Importantly, the framework does not prescribe specific preferences. Instead, it structures the conditions under which social information becomes psychologically actionable. In looser contexts, social comparison and socially transmitted cues are more readily engaged, so lifestyles observed online may be perceived as legitimate options. In tighter contexts, the perceived social and psychological costs of deviation may attenuate the influence of the very same cues, even when exposure is high.

Because the data came from many countries, the team first had to verify that the openness scale measured the same construct everywhere. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported configural and metric invariance—meaning the scale’s structure and loadings were comparable—but scalar invariance, needed for direct mean comparisons, was not achieved. The researchers therefore applied a statistical measurement alignment procedure to adjust factor loadings and intercepts across countries. The alignment performed exceptionally well: it absorbed over 99.6% of the non-invariance in both loadings and intercepts, fewer than 25% of items showed significant deviations, and Monte Carlo simulations confirmed that estimated country means correlated at .98 or higher with reference values.

With comparable scores in hand, the team turned to Bayesian multilevel modeling, which accounts for individuals being nested within countries and allows direct comparison of competing models via Bayes Factors. Three models were pitted against each other: a null model, a main-effects model including social media use and cultural tightness–looseness, and an interaction model adding the product of the two, with age included as a control. The interaction model won decisively. The main effect of social media use was strongly supported, with a standardized coefficient of about .14, and the interaction effect was also significant, indicating that the association between digital exposure and openness grows as countries become normatively looser.

Notably, cultural tightness–looseness showed no direct main effect on openness. Permissiveness alone did not generate openness to sugar relationships; rather, it conditioned whether social media exposure translated into attitudinal receptivity. This pattern suggests that cultural tightness–looseness acts as a kind of normative gatekeeper or filter: globally circulating relationship scripts acquire—or fail to acquire—psychological relevance depending on the surrounding normative climate. The finding aligns with social influence models proposing that informational exposure shapes preferences primarily when social constraints are weak, ambiguous, or contested.

Age emerged as a robust negative predictor, with openness declining across the adult age range even after controlling for social media use and cultural context. This is consistent with earlier cross-national work showing that receptivity to sugar relationships is most pronounced among younger women and fades across early adulthood, in line with life-course perspectives on changing mating priorities and identity exploration. However, because the data are cross-sectional, age effects cannot be disentangled from cohort or period effects, so generational explanations—such as younger cohorts having formed relational expectations within more digitally saturated environments—remain tentative.

The researchers also tested whether the pattern could be explained away by structural factors. Adding country-level indicators of digital infrastructure (internet and smartphone penetration), socioeconomic structure (female labor force participation and youth unemployment), and internet freedom (Freedom on the Net scores) failed to improve the model, which actually fit worse than the parsimonious interaction model. Exploratory checks reinforced the stability of the findings: leave-one-out analyses showed the effects held when each of the 22 countries was excluded in turn; controlling for individual socioeconomic status left the main and interaction effects intact; and random-slope models allowing the social media association to vary across countries still supported both effects. Sensitivity analyses with alternative prior distributions likewise left the conclusions unchanged.

The authors caution about the study’s limits. The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference about whether social media use shapes attitudes or whether more open individuals simply use social media more; the attitudinal focus says nothing about actual engagement in sugar relationships; and country-level cultural indices may mask within-country variation in norms. The study also measured overall social media use rather than specific content, and glamorized or aspirational portrayals of sugar dating may contribute disproportionately to normalization. Still, the broader message stands: digital exposure does not operate in isolation. Its attitudinal correlates vary systematically across countries, filtered through culturally embedded normative frameworks—a finding that suggests interventions or public discussions of transactional intimacy must account for cultural conditions, not just screen time, to be meaningful.

Subject of Research: Cross-national associations between social media use, cultural tightness–looseness, and women's openness to sugar relationships

Article Title: Social Media Use and Openness to “Sugar Relationships”: Cultural Tightness–Looseness as a Moderator Across 22 Countries

Article References: Meskó, N., Ehlers, J. S., Molnár, A., & Han, H. (2026). Social Media Use and Openness to “Sugar Relationships”: Cultural Tightness–Looseness as a Moderator Across 22 Countries. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03551-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03551-w

Keywords: social media, sugar relationships, cultural tightness, cross-cultural psychology, sexual attitudes, Bayesian multilevel modeling, measurement invariance, women, sexual-economic exchange, digital socialization, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Social