A Preregistered Study of Competing Predictions Suggests That Men Do Overestimate Women’s Sexual Intent

Method

A detailed description of the method and analyses is presented in the Supplemental Material available online; we provide a brief overview here.

We recruited 414 heterosexual women living in the United States (mean age = 37.7 years) through Amazon Mechanical Turk. All participants completed Perilloux and Kurzban’s dating-behaviors scale three times. First, they reported their own sexual intentions if they engaged in 15 different romantic behaviors (e.g., “If you held hands with him, how likely is it that you intend to have sex with him?”). The response scale ranged from 1 (extremely unlikely) to 7 (extremely likely). ¹ The 15 behaviors appeared in a fixed order for all participants. The next two times participants completed the scale, they indicated what they believed other women would say their sexual intentions are when they engage in each of the 15 behaviors and what they believed other women actually want when they engage in those behaviors. Some participants answered the “say” question first (the same order as Perilloux and Kurzban used), and others answered the “want” question first. Participants could see, but not change, their responses to previous questions (see Figs. SA1–SA3 in the Supplemental Material).

Results and Discussion

We replicated Perilloux and Kurzban’s results, as participants gave significantly lower ratings when they reported what other women say their sexual intentions are than when they reported what other women actually want. This pattern was found both for participants who answered the questions in the same order as in Perilloux and Kurzban’s study (i.e., “say” question first) and for participants who completed the questions in the reverse order. A mixed-model analysis of variance revealed a significant interaction between the order of the questions (“say” question first vs. “want” question first) and question type (“say” vs. “want”), F(1, 412) = 43.43, p < .001. Simple-effects analyses revealed that this interaction was consistent with our preregistered hypotheses: As shown in Figure 1, ratings for the “say” and “want” questions were equivalent when these questions were asked first, t(412) = 0.66, p > .25, Bayes factor favoring the null hypothesis (BF₀₁) = 7.43, 95% confidence interval (CI) of the difference = [−0.12, 0.25]. Only when participants were asked a follow-up question did they adjust their answers. This adjustment was upward if they were next asked what women actually want, t(206) = 3.67, 95% CI of the difference = [0.08, 0.27], d_z = 0.26, p < .001, and downward if they were next asked what women say, t(206) = −5.71, 95% CI of the difference = [−0.35,−0.17], d_z = 0.40, p < .001. These results support the hypothesis that women’s differential responses to the “say” and “want” questions in Perilloux and Kurzban’s study were driven by question-order effects and language conventions, rather than by women’s chronic underreporting of their sexual intentions. (See the Supplemental Material for detailed analyses and findings, a conceptual replication in an exploratory sample, and results of exploratory questions examining why women might act more or less sexually interested.)

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Fig. 1.

Participants’ mean estimates of what other women say their sexual intentions are and what they actually want, as a function of the order in which these questions are asked (see note 1). Error bars represent ±1 SE.

Perilloux and Kurzban asserted that evolution should shape men to accurately assess women’s sexual intent, but should bias men’s behavior to pursue sexual opportunities even when there is a low likelihood of success. Perilloux and Kurzban noted that biased beliefs have costs, so it is beneficial to bias only behavior. Although this is a reasonable argument, data and theory are inconsistent with it. For example, people tend to judge incoming objects to be moving faster than outgoing objects (Neuhoff, 2001) and dangerous spiders to be moving faster toward them than innocuous rubber balls are (Witt & Sugovic, 2013). People also judge a hill as steeper when they are standing at the top rather than at the bottom (Proffitt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, & Midgett, 1995), and fearful people at the top of a hill judge it to be steeper when they are standing on a skateboard rather than on a wooden box (Stefanucci, Proffitt, Clore, & Parekh, 2008). Similarly, men holding dangerous objects tend to seem angrier than men holding harmless objects (Holbrook et al., 2014). In each case, evolution could have biased only behavior, but instead appears to have biased perceptual judgments.

So why would evolution bias judgment and belief? Theory suggests that biased beliefs can make people more effective in their behaviors (Trivers, 2000, 2011; von Hippel & Trivers, 2011). Overperception of sexual interest makes men overconfident in their interactions with women, and this overconfidence can lead women to perceive men more positively (cf. Anderson, Brion, Moore, & Kennedy, 2012) and can deter male rivals (Murphy et al., 2015). Consequently, men who overperceive sexual interest may be more romantically effective than men who do not (Haselton & Buss, 2009). Although biased beliefs carry costs, their benefits may ultimately outweigh these costs.