A major psychological source of such conflicts is the fact that men sometimes infer sexual interest on the part of a woman when it may not exist. Laboratory experiments have documented this phenomenon. In one study, 98 men and 102 women from a midwestern university watched a ten-minute videotape of a conversation between a male professor and a female student. The student visits the professors office to ask for a deadline extension for a term paper. The actors in the film were a female drama student and a male drama professor. Neither the student nor the professor acted flirtatious or provocative, although both were instructed to behave in a friendly manner. People who witnessed the tape then rated the likely intentions of the woman using 7-point scales. Women watching the interaction were more likely to say that the student was trying to be friendly, with a rating of 6.45, and not sexy (2.00) or seductive (1.89). Men, while also perceiving friendliness (6.09), were significantly more likely than women to infer seductive (3.38) and sexual (3.84) intentions. Similar results were obtained when 246 university students rated the intentions of women in photographs of a man and woman studying together. Men rate the photographed women as showing moderate intent to be sexy (4.87) and seductive (4.08), whereas women rating identical photographs see considerably less sexual intent (3.11) and less seductive intent (2.61).Men apparently interpret simple friendliness and mere smiling by women as indicating some level of sexual interest, even when women report no such interest.
When in doubt, men seem to infer sexual interest. Men act on their inferences, occasionally opening up sexual opportunities. If over evolutionary history even a tiny fraction of these "misperceptions" led to sex, then men would have evolved lower thresholds for inferring women's sexual interest. It is impossible to state unequivocally that males are misperceiving women's sexual interest, because it is impossible to determine with certainty what someone's interests and intentions exactly are. But we can say with certainty that men have lower thresholds than women for reading in sexual interest.
Once this male mechanism is in place, it is susceptible to manipulation. Women sometimes use their sexuality as a tactic of manipulation. In one study of 200 university students, women significantly more than men report smiling and flirting as a means for eliciting special treatment from members of the opposite sex, even though they have no interest in having sex with those men.
Men's perception of sexual interest in women combines with women's intentional exploitation of this psychological mechanism to create a potentially volatile mix. These sexual strategies lead to conflict over desired level of sexual intimacy, over men's feelings that women lead them on, and over women's feelings that men are too pushy in the sexual sphere.
Men are more likely than women to assume that another individual is sexually interested in them when they're not. This may be a byproduct of sex differences in interest in casual sex: Men project their own level of interest onto women. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619900315
Ideas from evolutionary biology are largely accountable for the most prominent theories around why we see a sexual overperception bias. As reproductive rates have the potential to be higher in men than women, it is more “costly” for men to miss a mating opportunity than it is for women, and these differences in costs result in men being more sensitive to sexually opportunistic cues. In less academic terms: since men don’t have to go through the laborious journey of child-rearing in order to pass their DNA along, they’re naturally inclined to be more attentive to the possibility of sex as it’s less costly for them to replicate their genes than it is for women.
With a greater implicit attentiveness, the prevalence of false-positives in judging sexual interest is inevitable. This type of cognitive error has persisted over generations of homo sapiens, however, and is the crux of error-management theory (EMT).5 EMT suggests that certain cognitive biases can persist throughout evolutionary processes when the cost of one type of error is greater than the alternative. For biological males, a false-positive manifested in the sexual overperception bias is less costly than a false-negative, where a woman would be expressing sexual interest but the man would be oblivious (no gene replication for him!)
Some
people learn to use their looks to manipulate others. During a
fifth-grade lunch, Terry was very surprised when Nancy, one of the
cutest girls in his elementary school, came and sat with him. She said,
"That brownie is stale. You're not going to eat it, are you?" Still
stunned at his good fortune of having cute Nancy talking to him, Terry
replied, "Of course not." "Good, then you won't mind if I eat it." Nancy
took the brownie and never spoke to Terry again.
The
phenomenon of granting favors to attractive women is known more
generally as "the cute girl discount," and it's universal. In a slightly
more scientific version of Terry's brownie experiment, dimes were
planted in phone booths. When someone started using the phone, a women
would approach and ask, "Did I leave my dime there?" Nine out of ten
attractive women got their dime back compared with only six out of ten
plain women.
Lest
we think that only bad people are biased in their behavior, recall that
even babies stare longer at beautiful faces. We all have a preconscious
beauty filter that influences our behavior toward people. If this
favoritism seems as wrong to you as it does to us, we must try to
adjust. (Mean Genes)
In a typical experiment, a man and a woman engage in a spontaneous conversation for a few minutes. Unbeknownst to them, a male observer and a female observer watch the interaction from behind a one-way mirror. After the conversation is over, all four of them (the male participant, the female participant, the male observer, and the female observer) judge how romantically interested the female participant was in the male participant. The data show that the male participant and the male observer often judge the female participant to be more romantically interested in the male participant than the female participant and the female observer do. The men think that the woman is coming on to the man when the women don’t think she is.
Whether you are a man or a woman, if you think about your own life for a minute, you’ll soon realize that this is a very common occurrence. A man and a woman meet and engage in a friendly conversation. After the conversation, the man is convinced that the woman is attracted to him and perhaps wants to sleep with him, when the woman is entertaining no such thought; she’s just being nice and friendly. It is a common theme of many romantic comedies (as well as virtually every episode of Three’s Company.... Am I dating myself?) Why does this happen?
Haselton and Nettle’s Error Management Theory offers a very convincing explanation. Their theory begins with the observation that decision making under uncertainty often results in erroneous inference, but some errors are more costly in their consequences than others. Evolution should therefore favor an inference system that minimizes, not the total number of errors, but their total costs.
For example, in the case at hand, the man must decide, in the absence of complete information, whether the woman is romantically interested in him or not. If he infers that she is when she is in fact interested, or if he infers that she is not when she is in fact not interested, then he has made the correct inference. In the other two cases, however, he has made an error in inference. If he infers that she is interested when she is in fact not interested, then he has made an error of false positive (what the statisticians call the “Type I” error). In contrast, if he infers that she is not interested when she is in fact interested, then he has made an error of false negative (what the statisticians call the “Type II” error). What consequences do the false positive and false negative errors entail?
If he made the error of inferring she’s interested when she’s not, then he’d come on to her but ends up being rejected, laughed at, and possibly slapped in the face. If he made the error of inferring she’s not interested when she is, then he’d missed an opportunity for sex and possible reproduction. As bad as being rejected and laughed at is (and, trust me, it is), it is nothing compared to missing a genuine opportunity for sex. So, Haselton and Nettle argue, evolution has equipped men to overinfer women’s romantic and sexual interest in them, so that, while they may make a large number of false-positive errors (and, as a result, get slapped all the time), they would never miss a single opportunity for sex.
One example of a false-positive bias is in men’s estimations of women’s sexual
interest. For an ancestral man, failing to detect sexual interest in a woman resulted in a
missed reproductive opportunity, which was highly costly to his reproductive success.
The opposite error (believing that a woman was interested when she was not) was
perhaps a bit embarrassing, but probably was less costly overall. Thus, error
management theory predicts that natural selection designed a bias in men toward slightly overestimating a woman’s sexual interest in order to reduce the likelihood of a missed sexual opportunity; this leads modern men to “overpercieve” women’s sexual interest. (The same prediction does not apply to women’s perceptions because women need to invest very heavily in each offspring and because reproductive opportunities tend to be easier for women to acquire; see sexual strategies theory). Evidence of this bias has been gathered in many types of studies. In laboratory studies of interactions between male and female strangers, men viewing the interaction tend to infer greater flirtatiousness in the female than do women viewing the interaction. In surveys of people’s past experiences, women report more cases in which men overestimated their sexual interest than in which men underestimated it, whereas men’s reports of women’s over and underestimation errors do not differ. When men and women are shown romantic movies, men’s subsequent tendency to “see” sexual interest in photographs of neutral female faces is greater than women’s.
An example of a false negative bias is in women’s judgments of men’s interest in
commitment during courtship. Women must invest heavily in each offspring produced
and therefore they tend to be very careful in choosing mates and in consenting to sex.
One feature women prefer in mates is investment—a man’s ability and willingness to
invest time and resources in caring for a woman and her offspring. However, women
must predict a man’s tendency to invest from his behaviors, and therefore their judgments will be susceptible to some degree of error. Here again, there is an asymmetry in the costs of the errors in the judgment task. Judging that a man will commit and invest when he actually will not (a false positive error) could result in the woman consenting to sex and being subsequently abandoned. In harsh ancestral environments, this literally could have been deadly to the woman’s offspring. The opposite error—believing that the man is not committed when he actually is (a false negative)—would typically result only in a delay of reproduction for the woman, which would tend to be less costly. Error management theory therefore predicts that women will tend to be skeptical of men’s commitment, especially during the early phases of courtship. This prediction has been tested by comparing men’s and women’s impressions of male courtship behaviors. Relative to men, women express skepticism about a variety of male courtship tactics, including buying flowers, cooking a gourmet dinner, and saying I love you.
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