Sex on the mind? Testing whether intuitive biases underly male sexual overperception

The sexual overperception bias describes the hypothesised tendency of men to over-infer the sexual interest of women. According to Error Management Theory (EMT), this tendency evolved to be adaptive: If men believe that women are interested, then they will approach more women (erring on the side of approaching uninterested women than on the side of failing to approach interested women), thus reducing their chances of missed mating opportunities. As sexual overperception could be implicated in cases of sexual harassment and assault, it is important to understand whether men do in fact exhibit this bias. The evidence to date, however, remains equivocal. No previous studies have used tasks designed to measure intuitive biases to investigate this concept. We will adapt the representativeness task - used by Gervais et al. (2017) to assess intuitions about the immorality of atheists –to gauge intuitive biases in men about the sexual interest of women. This task asks participants to rate the likelihood of certain scenarios. Men may erroneously rate it more likely that a woman “likes them and is sexually interested in them” than a woman “liking them” only. This is a conjunction fallacy, as a conjunction cannot be more likely than one of its components. As per EMT’s hypotheses regarding the sexual overperception bias, we predict that men – but not women – will make the most conjunction fallacies where conjunctions reflect the sexual interest (as opposed to lack of sexual interest) of women. This study will be pre-registered on the Open Science Framework.

The sexual overperception bias occurs when men misinterpret signs of friendliness or politeness from women as signs of sexual interest. According to Error Management Theory, this is an evolved cognitive bias in men. When deciding whether a woman is interested in him, a man may make one of two errors: falsely thinking she is interested when she is not (and thus wasting time pursuing her/being rejected) or he may falsely think she is not interested when she in fact is (and thus missing a mating opportunity). EMT hypothesises that this last error is more costly for men, and so they have evolved to assume interest when unsure to reduce missed mating opportunities. However, the evidence for EMT is mixed - despite some early work replicating this bias, recent efforts tend to see a more nuanced perspective. There is also debate as to whether men overperceive women due to evolved, cognitive biases or due to the influence of society and the media etc. If sexual overperception is indeed an evolved cognitive bias, then men should be more likely than women to falsely perceive sexual interest on a cognitive fallacy task that we adapt to be about sexual interest.

In prep - sexual overperception did not replicate though!