Do Men Overestimate Women’s Sexual Interest?
Imagine you’ve met someone new. You’ve been dating for a couple of weeks, and have just shared dinner at a restaurant. Now you’re taking a moonlight stroll on the beach, possibly because you live in a 90’s romcom.
Your date slips their hand into yours.
I Made Yanuarta DPY, CC BY 2.0
Right. Stop. Pause the tape there and answer this question: What is the likelihood that your date will have sex with you? Not right now, on the beach, like sea otters. But tonight, in bed, like humans. Or bed bugs.
Think of a number between -3 (extremely unlikely) and +3 (extremely likely).
Have you done that? OK.
Now, say your date kisses you passionately. Pause again. Now how likely is it you’re going make the beast with two backs before sunup?
What if your date whispers in your ear that it feels as though you’ve known each other your whole lives, and suggests you head back to their apartment for a drink? Imagine they even do that thing where they put a couple of air quotes around ‘drink’, then wink theatrically and tap the side of their nose?
None of these behaviours mean that sex is guaranteed, but many of you will have thought that by the time it got to winking your chances of striking it lucky were significantly higher than they were when you were simply holding hands.
But you were probably imagining a date of a certain sex. For most of you, this will be the sex other than your own. Instead, picture how your calculations might have varied if your date were a different sex. If you imagined a female date, now imagine a male. If you imagined a man, now think about a woman.
Do men and women gauge the sexual interest of their dates differently?
Research from the past 30 or so years suggests that, yes, they do. Men typically overperceive women’s sexual interest. They think a woman is interested in sex when in reality, she isn’t. Which is not to say that women aren’t interested in sex. It’s just that, for a man, a kiss might mean that within the next half hour you should both be naked, smeared in lemon curd, and hitting page 69 of the Kama Sutra. For a woman, a kiss might mean that you’re kissing. Right now. And that’s it.
Is there any special reason for this difference between men and women? Well, in our ancestral past, when humans were ambling around the Serengeti waiting for someone to invent Netflix, men were constantly on the lookout for casual hookups. So, not much different from today. Except that we wouldn’t be here unless our forefathers were really good at getting laid, a lot. A Cro-Magnon man was only constrained in the number of children he could sire — the number of descendents he could leave — by the number of women he could persuade to sleep with him. In a cave. Like bears.
Anyway, after thousands of years, evolution shaped men’s minds such that they never failed to miss an opportunity for sex. Women, on the other hand, were selected to be somewhat more choosy. There are reasons why flings are beneficial for women, too. But even the most reproductively successful woman can only pop out 10 or 20 sprogs if she goes at it full tilt between the ages of 15 and 45. It doesn’t pay for women to get knocked up by every Tom, Dick, and Willy.
So, when a man suspects that sex might be on the cards, he gets very excited indeed. Women, less so. A man is like a hypersensitive smoke alarm. Nobody wants a smoke alarm that only goes off when your building is already a giant bonfire. Even though it’s annoying to have to jump up and down, waving a dishcloth at the ceiling every time you burn the toast, it’s better to have an alarm that’s oversensitive to smoke than to roast in a towering inferno. Same with men: it made more sense for our ancestors to pursue a woman who might be interested in sex, than walk away from the possibility of a spot of how’s your father.
So, that’s why men are thought to be more confident in their belief that women find them attractive, than women are of men’s sexual interest. However, even though scientists have reported this sex difference multiple times, most of their research has been performed in the US. If men have evolved to overperceive women’s sexual interest, this should be a universal trait. All men should think this way, regardless of where they’re born or brought up.
Which brings us to a new study by Carin Perilloux of the Texas State University. Perilloux and her colleagues collected data in France, Spain, and Chile, as well as the US. Their aim: to find out if chaps from overseas are as misguided and self-assured as American men. The results of their study were published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.
Perilloux had heterosexual men and women complete the Dating Behaviors Scale, or DBS. This questionnaire works much the same as the hypothetical dating scenario I explained earlier. The research participants were asked to imagine they had been on a few dates with someone of the opposite sex. Then, on a scale or -3 to +3 the women rated how likely they would be to have sex with the man, assuming that she had already engaged in each of 15 behaviours, which included holding hands, sharing an expensive dinner, receiving a dozen red roses, and so on. The men rated how likely it was that their female date would agree to have sex with them after the same 15 behaviours.
The idea is that, if women and men consistently disagree about the likelihood of sex, then someone is kidding themselves. Someone is overconfident. In America, this is almost always men. American men think sex is likely; American women, less so.
What about men and women from other countries?
Well, the non-Americans of both sexes tended to think hanky panky was more likely than Americans did. French men and women, especially, conformed to their national stereotype by rating the probability of sex really rather highly compared to their transatlantic cousins. And the sex difference travelled too. In Spain, Chile, and France, men overperceived women’s likely sexual interest. The sex difference appears to be universal.
But Perilloux decided to dig a little deeper into her data. She looked at how the sexes varied in their responses to each of the 15 behaviour items on the Dating Behaviors Scale, and she discovered something quite interesting. In the US, men overperceived women’s interest across the whole range of behaviours. They’ve held hands? The man thinks sex is more likely than the women does. He’s sent her roses? Again, the man is already reaching for the condoms; she’s in her pyjamas with a copy of Gone Girl and a glass of warm milk. They’ve stared deeply into each others’ eyes? He’s got a hockey stick down the front of his pants; she’s already been asleep for sixty minutes.
In other countries, the story is different. In fact, most of the overall sex difference is down to one item: a disagreement about what it signifies when a woman buys a man jewellery. What does that even mean? Spaniards, Chileans, and the French had no idea, because a woman buying a man jewellery is so alien a concept that they were utterly bamboozled. And when Perilloux discounted that one item from the questionnaire, any overall sex difference practically vanished.
So, perhaps men’s overconfidence isn’t universal, and is instead confined to America. Maybe. But Perilloux has another idea. It could be American women who are the odd ones out. American women rated sex as less likely than both men and women from any of the four countries. Rather than American men being inveterate overestimators of their irresistible sex appeal, American women might be underestimating the likelihood that they would agree to sex.
I interviewed Carin Perilloux on the podcast back in 2011 about her previous research on the risk factors for sexual assault. It was a great chat! You can hear that interview here.
Perilloux, C., Muñoz-Reyes, J. A., Turiegano, E., Kurzban, R., & Pita, M. (in press). Do (non-American) men overestimate women’s sexual intentions? Evolutionary Psychological Science. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 14 July 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
