For many years, psychologists have understood that young men are more likely than young women to interpret nonverbal signs of friendliness for sexual interest. It’s the old “she’s in the room–she wants me” thing. What hasn’t been so clearly understood is why this discrepancy occurs.
A prevailing theory suggests that young men simply have a global tendency to over-sexualize the social environment. I suppose Sigmund Freud would be comfortable with this reasoning. There might, however, be a simpler answer. Colleen Farris of Indiana University, Bloomington, and her colleagues believe that women simply have an advantage in interpreting nonverbal cues in general, not just where sexual interest is involved.
In a study set to appear in the April edition of Psychological Science, Farris asked 280 heterosexual college men and women to categorize photos of women into four categories: friendly, sexually interested, sad, or rejecting. Of the four categories, both men and women were least accurate in judging sexual interest. Men made more errors, categorizing 12 percent of the friendly images as sexually interested. Women incorrectly categorized 8.7 percent of the friendly images as sexually interested.
The women did not just perform better on the sexually interested images. Their advantage also held in judging friendliness, sadness, and rejection. Consequently, Farris doesn’t believe that men have an isolated problem judging sexual interest, but are simply at a small relative disadvantage in judging nonverbal behavior in general.
The consequences of mistakes, however, could be significant. A man who believes a woman’s friendliness is really sexual interest might lead to embarrassment at a minimum and coercion at its worst.
I was puzzled by Farris’ methodology–asking both men and women to judge nonverbal cues in women’s photos only. I have often observed that men do a very good job of judging other men, and that women do likewise with other women, but that both seem a bit blinded when observing the opposite sex. The female advantage observed by Farris might simply reflect the greater ability to identify with one’s own sex–when I feel sad, this is how I look.
I hope that Farris follows up this interesting work by asking men and women to judge the nonverbal cues of men as well.
1 Comment
parvezrashid · April 6, 2008 at 4:57 pm
I think the dilemma here is that the idea of sexuality for everyone differs. What some see has wretched and disgusting, others see as sexual and provocative. So perhaps its not that men are constantly misjudging a woman’s actions, but rather that they are seeing the action through their normal bias.
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