Engagement in one-night stands in Germany and Spain: Does personality matter?

•We studied personality and cultural factors related to one-night stands.•Extraversion and sensation seeking were the strongest predictors.•Spanish participants reported significantly more one-night stands than Germans.•Overall, the set of predictors explained a rather small amount of variance.

Casual sex such as spontaneous sexual interactions with strangers (i.e., one-night stands) represents a common sexual experience for many young adults. Previous research focused either on individual differences or on cross-cultural effects that predict the engagement in one-night stands. This study integrates both lines of research and examines the effects of four personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, sensation seeking, and the need for affect) on the number of one-night stands in two countries (Germany and Spain). A web-based study on N = 913 adults (759 women) showed that extraversion and sensation seeking are the strongest predictors of engagement in one-night stands. These results were replicated for participants from both countries indicating universal personality effects across cultures. The study highlights the importance of adopting an individual difference perspective in sex research.