ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a line of research inspired by Bob Siegler's work on children's arithmetic. It analyses the strategies people use when they are confronted with behavioral frequency questions of this sort, the nature of the biases associated with the selected strategy, and the possibility that between-sex differences in the selection and execution of these strategies provide, at least, a partial solution to an important problem in the survey-research literature. The chapter explains why the existence of this partner discrepancy is of concern and outlines three very different approaches to explain it: a sampling account; a social account; and a cognitive account. It summarizes the results from two large-scale surveys, surveys that demonstrate the role of strategy differences, as well as the importance of social factors, in the partner discrepancy phenomenon. The strategies differences account provides a cognitive explanation for the partner discrepancy rather than a social one.
