In the World of Mating, Biased Perceptions Are Everywhere
“… if you lived in a group, as humans have always done, persuading others of your own needs and interests would be fundamental to your well-being. Sometimes you had to use cunning. Clearly, you would be at your most convincing if you persuaded yourself first and did not even have to pretend to believe what you were saying. The kind of self-deluding individuals who tended to do this flourished, as did their genes. So it was we squabbled and scrapped, for our unique intelligence was always at the service of our special pleading and selective blindness to the weakness of our case.”
(McEwan, 1997, p. 112)
If you’re old enough to be reading this book, then you’re old enough to know without question that this subheading, “perceptions of the social world are imperfect,” is necessarily true. How many times have you totally misread a social situation? Ever go to a party where you didn’t know too many people, fully expecting a dull time—only to be surprised by how friendly everyone was and how fun the whole experience ended up being?
How many times have you ever misread yourself? Ever use the phrase “I’d never do that”—only to find that, as life progresses, doing that becomes a common part of your behavioral repertoire? When one of the authors of this book (GG) was a bit younger, he’d primarily drink beer—concluding that he’d “never become a wine guy—that’s just not me.” Years later, he rarely drinks beer, and he can actually discriminate between a shiraz and a merlot with some level of accuracy. And he can tell the bad box wine from the really bad box wine! But 28-year old GG never would have imagined.
As McEwan’s insight at the start of this chapter suggests, an inaccurate, biased, erroneous, and imperfect cognitive system makes all too much sense as characterizing a species like ours. Indeed, it’s been shown over and over again that the way we think about abilities in general (e.g., whether they are fixed or malleable), as well as our self-perceived level of ability, significantly affects success above and beyond our measured ability.1 Self-belief (or in some cases, self-deception!) is adaptive in domains such as academic achievement, business, sports, and love. Why not the mating domain as well?
And as O’Sullivan’s2 research tells us, self-deception, which often has a significant mating-relevant component, is defining of who we are—and self-deception is an effective tool in solving evolutionarily adaptive problems. For instance, consider a guy who’s really pretty average on most physical and behavioral dimensions. Average Joe. Just how adaptive would it be for Average Joe to see himself as Average Joe? There’d be some interesting conversations:
YOUNG WOMAN: So tell me about yourself, Joe.
JOE: Well, there’s not much to tell. I’m pretty average. I’m not really great at anything much. I’ve always done OK at school, but not much better than OK. People sometimes tell me I’m a nice guy—but I’m not like super-nice—pretty average on that one too, now that I think about it….
YOUNG WOMAN: Oh! I’m sorry Jim, there’s my friend Susie over there … I’ll be right back!
Okay, Joe—sometimes honesty can be a self-handicap. In fact, modest levels of self-enhancement (seeing oneself in an overly positive light) seem to be adaptive in both the everyday sense (it helps you cope with who you are on an ongoing basis) and in an evolutionary sense (allowing you to cope well in social situations certainly is beneficial in terms of turning up mating opportunities and holding onto high-quality mates).
Social psychology is the branch of psychology that deals with the psychology of the social world—largely including how people perceive themselves and others. A core theme of social psychology pertains to the study of such social-perceptual biases as self-enhancement. In the next section, we discuss several basic kinds of social-perceptual biases in a way that connects with the mating domain.
The study of biased attitudes and perceptions has been so extensive in the field of social psychology3 that, to some extent, this field can be thought of as an area that is largely dedicated to documenting the shortcomings of human social cognition. Although a full list of such biases would be too comprehensive for inclusion here, several major biases that likely bear on issues of human mating follow.
In a series of studies on the concept of knowing more than we can know, Nisbett and Wilson4 found strong evidence for the fact that people cannot be relied on to give accurate answers when asked for reasons underlying why they have done what they have done. These studies are simple, powerful, and elegant. In one study, two groups of college students watched a movie (same movie over two showings in the same room). During one showing, conditions were normal. During the other, a loud drilling sound emerged from the hallway during the entire movie. People in the “loud drilling sound” condition didn’t like the movie nearly as much as participants in the other condition. When asked why they didn’t like it, they easily gave reasons. It was a poorly thought-out plot. The acting seemed forced. It was predictable. The settings were not well-done. Not a single person said “I think I didn’t like it partly because of the annoying loud noise that was present throughout.” In other words, with this simple experimental design, the experimenters were able to show (1) that the noise made it so that people did not like the movie and (2) that people were fully unconscious of this fact in thinking about their attitude about the movie.
The idea that we are “strangers to ourselves” (the title of Wilson’s 2002 book) has been shown time and time again in a variety of domains, from problem solving to happiness.5 As a species, we’re not that great at describing why we act the way we do, and we’re not that great at predicting how we are going to feel in the future.
Does this kind of thing also happen in the mating world? Certainly. For instance, we know what kinds of physical and psychological features make someone attractive to others. It’s often the case that someone is attracted to someone else because of some such specific feature (e.g., smooth skin) without realizing the cause of the attraction. Then you could see courtship, dating, and the development of a long-term relationship forming—all because one member of the couple had smooth skin when they first met and this feature was attractive enough to spark the courtship process. When asked years later about how the relationship began, the smooth skin when they first met may well be the kind of detail that gets lost in the retelling—just like the loud noise in the hallway accompanying the movie.
And, of course, in the mating arena, skin texture is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers have documented a dizzying array of factors that have unconscious influences on attraction, courtship, and relationship maintenance—from things like height, underarm scent, and facial symmetry to appropriate and effective use of self-denigrating humor, displays of kindness, and musical displays.
It is one thing to state mate preferences on a paper-and-pencil questionnaire and quite another thing when we are actually interacting with a flesh-and-blood person. Research does suggest that the traits people select in real life can differ drastically from the “cool,” rational state of mind we are in when we are ticking boxes on an experimentally administered checklist.6 In one study, the strongest predictor of desirability was physical attractiveness, even though women reported that their decisions were based on their desired level of relationship commitment. In reality, this factor was one of the least important factors! Interestingly, the men in their sample accurately indicated that physical attractiveness influenced their ratings. Maybe men deceive themselves less when it comes to what attracts them (at least when it comes to physical attraction), or they are more honest about it.
Either way, our point is this: humans are complex beings, and once you add context, hormones, and emotions into the mix, behaviors become even harder to predict.
This doesn’t negate the evolutionary approach to understanding mating; it just means we have to be more nuanced in our predictions. Although people may have evolutionarily evolved ideal preferences, the actual mating marketplace considerably constrains the actual attainment of those preferences. Also, as we’ve mentioned (see Chapter 5), context affects how people actually act in a given situation. Most of these contextual effects lie outside of our conscious awareness or even access. Although the ways we act in the mating domain may sometimes seem perplexing to others and even to ourselves, a further understanding of the evolutionary rationale for these behaviors may give us insight into why we do what we do. All of these considerations need to be taken into account when applying the mating intelligence concept to understand actual human mating behavior.
People can tell you all about mating in their lives—but given the sophisticated nature of our unconscious processing of so much information, any and all self-reports regarding one’s mating history should be taken with a grain of salt. And a course in social psychology.
In a classic series of studies in the 1970s, Lee Ross documented a deeply entrenched part of human social psychology—dubbed, infamously, the Fundamental Attribution Error.7 This bias in social cognition generally corresponds to the tendency to think that social outcomes derive from dispositional, internal sources more than from external causes—especially for people other than oneself. In a classic study of this phenomenon, Ross had undergraduate students engage in a quiz show in which the “questioner” created difficult questions that were then asked of the “contestant” in front of a randomly selected “observer.” The roles of questioner and contestant were determined by a coin flip that was done when the observer was present. Subsequent to the coin flip, the questioner proceeded to ask the questions of the contestant. On average, contestants got 40% of the questions correct. Later, the observer was asked to rate the questioner and the contestant in terms of intelligence—and (here’s the bottom line) the observers consistently rated the questioners as more intelligent than the contestants (which should not have actually been the case on average because all participants were selected from the same population and were randomly assigned across these two conditions). Short version: observers saw the questioner as more intelligent than the contestant (he had to seem more intelligent; he had all the answers on him!)—and instead of attributing this outcome to the random assignment to conditions, observers demonstrated the fundamental attribution error by overestimating the role of a dispositional trait (intelligence) as the cause of what was observed.
Interestingly, people don’t make this same kind of dispositional attribution about their own behavior. After failing a test, people rarely say, “Well, I’m just an idiot”—they are more likely to blame something in the situation:
• It was an unfair test!
• Is this professor kidding us, asking a question about a detail stuck in the middle of the textbook?
• I went to all the lectures and none of the questions were based on the lectures!
And so forth.
For this reason, the fundamental attribution error is now framed in terms of the broader “actor/observer effect” in which people tend to overestimate dispositional causes of the behaviors of others but downplay the importance of dispositional causes of their own behavior.
Does this play out in mating contexts? You bet. Imagine a woman who found herself in a situation with a guy after a party—after several drinks. She thought the guy was cute and doesn’t remember too much of what else happened—though she seems to remember sex.
How might this situation play out differently from the perspectives of self versus other? If that woman’s you, you’re probably feeling a mixture of emotions when you wake up in this guy’s room the next morning. Partly, you think “Wow, this guy’s pretty cute”—perhaps followed by “This is the second time I’ve done this with a new guy in a month—I have to stop going to these frat parties”—perhaps along with “Kegs shouldn’t be allowed at those parties—there was just so much alcohol—I’m just going to slink out of here and go find my friend to talk to.”
The attributions made by another would likely be different and would likely focus less on situational factors. Imagine, for instance, another woman in the same group who’s actually had her eye on this same guy. “She is so promiscuous! Do you know she did this same thing last week with that guy from Theta Xi? I think I heard she’s been with half the guys in that frat….”
Notice that the stories differ slightly in terms of a few things, but they differ particularly in terms of the focus put on dispositional versus situational causes. The woman who woke up with the frat guy blames the alcohol and even the university’s broader alcohol policy. The other woman, here presented as an intrasexual rival, sees one clear, glaring, dispositional explanation for this whole thing—that woman’s just promiscuous. In making this kind of attribution, all situational factors are immediately discounted and deemed irrelevant.
In the world of mating, the actor/observer effect plays a pivotal role.
Extraverts think most other people are extraverts. Christians overestimate the number of other Christians. People with blue eyes overestimate the number of others with blue eyes. People who are “pro-life” overestimate the percentage of others who are actually “pro-life.” The false-consensus effect8 pertains to the fact that we tend to overestimate the degree to which others are like us. And it’s easy to see how this bias comes about. You spend 100% of your time in your body, mind, and social world. You spend 0% of your time in the shoes of anyone else. The world looks a certain way to you, and it’s always surprising to experience someone seeing some part of it very differently. So we naively overestimate the degree to which others share our traits, dreams, beliefs, attitudes, and even experiences (“What do you mean you’ve never been to France? How could a 40-year-old, educated American have never been to France?”).
A particularly problematic instance of the false consensus effect in the mating domain pertains to sex differences in behaviors related to sexual harassment. When asked how bad sexual harassment is, men and women both report that it’s bad9—but women, whose reproductive futures are more capable of being adversely affected by outcomes associated with harassment (such as rape) hold attitudes about harassment that are relatively negative compared with the attitudes held by males. Owing to the false consensus effect, however, men don’t always get this—and this is a major psychological problem with damaging social consequences. It’s almost as if men who engage in harassing behavior are thinking, “Oh it’s a little bad, but it’s not that bad,” whereas women who are victimized by such behavior are thinking, “No, actually, it is really bad.” The false consensus effect may well be a crucial psychological factor that underlies sexual harassment and aggression (see next chapter for more on the importance of perspective taking).
Modern social psychology has turned up findings that have called many standard issues of mental health into question. For one, Taylor and Brown,10 along with others,11 have found strong evidence suggesting that biased (as opposed to accurate) perceptions of the world are actually relatively adaptive. That is, in many cases, being wrong may actually be more associated with mental health than being right.
The two classic examples of phenomena that fall into this category are self-enhancement12 and the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which they control situations.13 These inter-related biases have something in common—they both speak to errors in perception, but the nature of the errors is positive. Self-enhancement is seeing yourself as better than is warranted (along various dimensions), and overestimating control is seeing yourself as being more powerful, in a very literal sense, than is warranted.
Generally speaking, people tend to engage in self-enhancement, and they tend to overestimate their control over environmental conditions. Although these biases are defined as erroneous, it’s not too hard to see how they’re also adaptive.
Consider a famous set of psychology experiments from the 1960s in which dogs were exposed to electrical shock emitted through the floor (ouch!). In these famous studies conducted by Martin Seligman and colleagues,14 half the dogs were given some option that was able to shut the shock off (e.g., jumping over a small fence to another part of the room that had no shock). The other dogs were not given such an option (e.g., going over the fence led to another part of the floor that also emitted shocks). In a later phase of the study, all dogs were put in a condition in which they could remove the shock—but only dogs who had previously been in the condition in which their behavior actually had control over the situation took advantage of this opportunity. Dogs that were previously in the condition in which nothing could be done to ameliorate the shock did not, at this later phase, take action to remove the shock (even though they now could have removed the shock).
The dogs that learn they can control their environment are happier and are more likely to take action in their future to make good decisions for their own well-being. Seligman’s research stands as among the most important research in all of psychology. Psychologists are still reaping lessons from this work on learned helplessness.
Social psychologists who are interested in the effects of perceived control over environmental conditions have run with Seligman’s ideas. We now know that heightened levels of perceptions of control over situations (even if not fully warranted) are adaptive and healthy—as is the tendency to see oneself in a relatively positive light.
With our example of Average Joe, we addressed how self-enhancement can be relevant to mating contexts by helping increase confidence and helping, thus, turn up positive mating opportunities. Here, we consider the potential impact of a heightened sense of control on mating outcomes.
A long-term mateship can easily turn toward a rut. Several standard issues emerge in long-term relationships, including disagreements about money and time investment15 along with the omnirelevant issue of sex.16 Such disagreements and resultant difficulties are actually quite normal. Sometimes, such issues lead to separation and divorce, but sometimes they don’t. Given the importance of perceived control in social situations, we believe that having a sense of control over a long-term relationship is probably crucial to the success of the relationship. Having both members of a couple share such perceived self-control is particularly beneficial.
If both members of a couple feel zero control over the relationship and everything that goes along with it, then good luck! That scenario is sure to lead to unhappiness and disillusionment. If one member of the couple feels a sense of control more than the other, that could lead to a sense of inequity,17 which is certainly a negative force for any relationship. If both members of a couple perceive control over the environment that envelops the relationship, it is probably a good thing; the lessons of learned helplessness research suggest that slightly exaggerated perceptions of relationship control may well be the cat’s meow when it comes to relationship functioning. Long-term mating intelligence likely serves an important function in helping members of couples realize a healthy sense of relationship control.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a major theory of human psychology emerged from the laboratory of Leon Festinger at Stanford University. Through a series of carefully conducted social psychological experiments, Festinger and colleagues18 demonstrated a variety of ironic effects of large reinforcement. The main finding was that under certain conditions, a large reinforcer for completing some task (e.g., $20), compared with a small reinforcer (e.g., $1), led to relatively negative attitudes about the task. The “trick” here is essentially this: Participants who were given large reinforcers, under certain conditions, attributed their prior work not to anything intrinsically rewarding about the work, but, rather, to the fact that they got this large amount of money.
In this classic study, two groups of participants had engaged in a series of mundane tasks. Members of both groups were then told to tell a subsequent participant that the task was fun. They were told they’d either get $1 or $20 for their participation. Their attitudes about the tasks were then studied separately at the end of the study. The participants who were given $20 reported relatively negative attitudes about the tasks at the end; participants given only $1 reported relatively positive attitudes.
Festinger and his team interpreted these findings in terms of cognitive dissonance reduction processes. That is, these researchers believed that a strong force to keep one’s thoughts in harmony is at work. It was harder for people to hold a positive attitude about the mundane task if they could justify that they had done the task for a lot of money—this justification is not dissonant with the fact that the person did the mundane tasks. Participants in the other condition could not justify participation in terms of the amount of money, so, as part of a hypothesized universal drive to strive toward cognitive harmony, these people adjusted their attitudes—telling themselves that they liked these tasks. And this is how you can get someone to like doing something for a pittance, if you’re so inclined.
In the world of human social perception, cognitive dissonance reduction has important implications. Our thoughts, our attitudes, and our perceptions are partly motivated by a desire for cognitive consistency. And cognitive dissonance plays an important role when it comes to all the different facets of human mating.19 In fact, cognitive dissonance could be a crucial form of psychological glue for the healthy maintenance of long-term relationships. In a study of nearly 200 adults who were in relationships at the time of the study, participants rated current partners in more positive terms compared with former partners. Current partners were consistently rated as more agreeable, secure, emotionally stable, open-minded, and conscientious compared with past partners. Further, participants who demonstrated the largest discrepancy between their perceptions of current versus former partners were also scored as having the most satisfying relationships in the sample.
These findings went on to suggest that there is a significant physiological cost to not holding positive perceptions of one’s current partner and negative perceptions of a former partner! In this study, electrodermal activity was measured for more than 60 of the participants. Electrodermal activity is a standard measure of the arousal of the autonomic nervous system as it activates when we perceive a situation as a threat. In one experimental condition, participants were asked to write positive attributes about their most recent former romantic partner—engaging, thereby, in a task predicted to elicit a state of dissonance. Consistent with Festinger’s prediction, electrodermal activity was higher for participants in this condition compared with participants in other experimental conditions. As such, our tendency to see our mating world in an optimized, cognitively consonant manner seems strongly connected to our underlying physiology.
What does this mean for the pursuit of a satisfied romantic life? Well, if you’re currently committed to a relationship with Fred, and Barney is now in your past, holding Fred in a relatively positive light compared with Barney will reinforce your choices. Imagine the kind of cognitive dissonance that would be created by holding a former partner (Barney, in this case) in a more positive light relative to a current partner (Fred). Based on this study by GG and colleagues, there are, in fact, a sizeable proportion of individuals out there who do, in fact, hold such a perceptual pattern—and, not surprisingly, people who like their former romantic partners more than their current partners are stressed out! When it comes to healthy intimate relationships, a little dissonance reduction—even if it’s based on somewhat distorted reasoning—is not always a bad thing.
One of the great advances in the behavioral sciences has been the large-scale application of evolutionary principles to understanding human behavior.20 In recent years, social psychologists have come to apply evolutionary principles to their scholarship more and more.21 This trend allows us to understand the many social-perceptual biases that have been studied for years by social psychologists in a much broader perspective.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes good sense that our perceptual systems should have certain biases. Consider, for instance, our visual system, which seems to be hypervigilant to stimuli resembling snakes.22 There are good reasons to believe that snakes represented a genuine hurdle to survival under ancestral conditions. Snakes represented negatively in samples of human cultures from all corners of the earth.23 Further, it is particularly noteworthy that approximately 12% of deaths in pre-westernized societies occur from snakebites.24 Today, as a result of significant evolutionary pressures across many generations, our visual system responds more quickly to snake-like stimuli than to other stimuli, and we are biased toward overperceiving ambiguous stimuli as snakes.25 Clearly, this perceptual bias has an adaptive function—utilizing our emotion system to keep ourselves clear of these potential killers. Indiana Jones may have seemed a bit irrational in his snake phobia, but he was not alone.
In a significant paper that integrated evolutionary psychology with the social-perception literature, Martie Haselton and David Buss26 demonstrated evidence for Error Management Theory, or the idea that the human perceptual system is designed, not to be accurate, but, rather, to reduce the likelihood of making costly errors. Drawing on the snake example we cited previously, it seems that our visual system was not designed to accurately perceive snakes but rather was shaped to overperceive snake-like stimuli as snakes in order to reduce the likelihood of getting killed by one. This process surely has saved lives.
Given the centrality of mating in human psychology from the evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that mating-relevant social perceptions should be biased in a way that increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction. Starting with Haselton and Buss’s27 work on this topic, this is precisely what researchers have found. And, as is true with so many areas of mating, the nature of these biases seems to be different in men and women.
Two significant perceptual biases specific to men nicely include (1) the tendency to oversexualize female stimuli,28 and (2) the tendency to be particularly sensitive to cues of sexual infidelity.
Since the 1980s, researchers have consistently found that men are more likely than women to see neutral stimuli of women as reflecting sexual desire.29 In a typical study on this topic, male and female participants are shown photographs of men and women in ambiguous situations. Participants are asked to estimate how much sexual interest each person in the photograph has in the other. Women tend to see the people in such photographs as not sexually involved; men tend to see sexuality—even when it’s not there, and particularly if the woman is smiling.
Until the advent of the evolutionarily formed Error Management Theory, this phenomenon was pretty much explained away as, “Well, men are pigs.” In light of the power of evolutionary theory, a much more satisfying explanation now exists. The oversexualization of women—that is, the tendency to overestimate sexual interest on the part of women—is likely a bias that increases mating opportunities. Men who tend to think that women are sexually interested are probably more likely to try to court women compared with other men. Given male mating psychology and the evolutionary benefits of increased mating opportunities for males, this bias seems clearly to predict increased mating success. The cost of an error using this strategy—embarrassment at rejection—is offset by the evolutionary benefit of increased mating opportunities.
Hypervigilant sexual jealousy represents another male-specific mating bias with a strong evolutionary foundation.30 Across multiple contexts—including disparate cultures—males respond strongly to signs of sexual infidelity compared with females.31 Given the evolutionary reality of paternal uncertainty—the fact that a man can never be fully certain that his wife’s offspring are, indeed, his also—males can experience dramatic evolutionary costs if their partner cheats sexually. There is an important asymmetry across the sexes on this issue because females across human evolutionary history were always certain that their offspring were, indeed, theirs.
Accordingly, several adaptive mechanisms have evolved to bias males toward hypervigilance regarding the issue of sexual infidelity.32 Males are more likely to respond with psychological distress to thoughts of sexual infidelity compared with females,33 they are more likely to experience physiological distress when thinking about sexual infidelity compared with females,34 and they are more likely to focus on details relevant to sexual infidelity when assessing social situations compared with females (also see Chapter 5 for an understanding of these findings in terms of attachment theory).35 These findings all make sense in light of Error Management Theory—the evolutionary benefits for a male to be hypervigilant about sexual infidelity (curtailing a woman from becoming pregnant by another man) outweigh the costs (such as gaining a reputation as a jealous guy or engaging in unhealthy, obsessive jealousy).
Females are not immune from social-perceptual biases, either.
As Haselton and Buss36 documented, women are commitment skeptics—they are more likely than men to be skeptical of statements of commitment compared with men. Rightfully so. Unlike men, women are at risk for getting stuck with the huge evolutionary cost of raising an offspring with no other parental help. This outcome is particularly likely if a woman does not effectively mate with a male who is willing to commit to a long-term relationship. The cost of commitment skepticism, losing out on mating opportunities with males who may actually be good guys, is minor compared with the major evolutionary benefit of this bias, which is to reduce the likelihood of mating with a cad.
Another bias that typifies female psychology is the tendency to think that there just might be someone better out there during the mate-search process.37 As discussed in Chapter 5, research in a speed-dating context that replicated real-world mate selection found that men tend to settle much more quickly than women do.38 Given how evolutionarily crucial it is for women to discriminate in choosing a mate, it makes good sense that they would be biased toward checking out a relatively large number of suitors. An understanding of how women make mating decisions is an important step toward understanding human nature.
This chapter has focused on biases that permeate human mating psychology. In our own recent study exploring the ability to assess the mating desires of the opposite sex, we found that this kind of assessment is filled with bias—but it also includes a touch of accuracy.39
One of the core elements of mating intelligence is the ability to read the thoughts and feelings of potential and actual mates. In a large-scale study designed to examine this ability, nearly 500 young men and women were asked to read through several real personal ads, written by members of their own sex. They were then asked to guess which ads would be most attractive to members of the opposite sex for a long-term relationship—and which ads would be most attractive to members of the opposite sex for a short-term, casual fling.
The ads varied from one another in terms of many dimensions. One particular dimension of interest pertained to sexual content; all ads were coded by two research assistants trained to study the ads for the presence of sexual content.
This research represents some of the first psychological research explicitly designed with the notion of mating intelligence in mind.
In the initial data analysis, participants’ assessments were examined for accuracy: were people good at guessing which ads were most attractive (for both long-term and short-term mateships) to members of the opposite sex?
Participants were not that great at this task. Many errors were made by both males and females. In light of prior work on Error Management Theory, we hypothesized that both males and females would tend to oversexualize the desires of the opposite sex. We predicted males to be likely to overchoose ads that were sexual in nature in guessing what women wanted. Such a tendency would reflect a bias toward oversexualizing the desires of women, consistent with Haselton and Buss’s40 research on Error Management Theory. And this is precisely what we found in our research. When men did err, they tended to err by overestimating the degree to which women desired men who wrote relatively sexual ads.
For instance, for one set of ads, men were faced with three choices given in Table 6.1 (they were asked to guess which ad women would prefer for a short-term mate).
The “correct” answer here was “diversity, cultures, and art …” (option C)—although a large number of males missed the boat, assuming that women prefer “… man in a uniform looking for some fun” (option B). Apparently, men overestimate how interested women are in conspicuous male sexuality—even under conditions that are explicitly framed as bearing on short-term mating!
We also predicted that women would err by overestimating the degree to which men expressed a desire for women who wrote relatively sexual ads. This predicted bias was framed as reflecting commitment skepticism—if a woman overestimates a male’s tendency to just want sex, this bias would go hand-in-hand with being skeptical of a man’s intentions. Consistent with prior work on Error Management Theory, this is precisely what we found—particularly for women trying to guess the short-term desires of men.
Table 6.1 Male Short-Term Mating Judgment Example
For instance, in making these judgments, women had to choose which of the ads shown in Table 6.2 was most desirable to a male for a short-term mating.
The results found that not only were women’s guesses of men’s desires off, but they were off in an interesting way. The promiscuous-flaunting woman of option B is not very popular as a short-term mate among the men (only 24% wanted her), but a majority of women thought that this was the woman whom men most wanted! Whom did men really want? Well, a majority of men wanted the middle-of-the-night sandwich maker! And remember, this is what men wanted in a short-term partner.
Table 6.2 Female Short-Term Mating Judgment Example
Apparently there’s more to the male psyche than just sex! Interestingly, knowing all the words to Grease wasn’t very attractive, either.
Taking in the results of this study, it seems that women might be oversexualizing men’s desires, whereas men might well be doing the same, at least when assessing women’s short-term desires.
But in this data set, there’s more to the story.
The fact that so many mating-relevant judgments are biased—and that such bias so often makes evolutionary sense—is something of a conundrum for the concept of mating intelligence. After all, the entire idea of intelligence conjures up accurate cognitive processes, doesn’t it? And the idea of biased perception seems a bit far from the idea of intelligence.
We agree. For this reason, we believe mating intelligence, steeped in an evolutionary perspective,41 represents an intelligence that is, in many ways, different from other kinds of intelligence.42 As a set of evolutionarily adaptive cognitive processes, mating intelligence, in fact, represents a combination of accuracy and bias.
In our own cross-sex mind-reading research described in this chapter, biases were rampant. But recall that men and women were asked to guess both the long-term and short-term desires of members of the opposite sex. In our statistical analysis, we examined accuracy in judging long-term desires and accuracy in judging short-term desires, and we found a major difference between the sexes. Males were much better than females at guessing the long-term desires of the opposite sex—women were, conversely, much better than males at guessing the short-term desires of the opposite sex. In other words, men are better at knowing what women want in long-term partners, whereas women are better at knowing what men want in short-term partners.
The finding that men are more accurate at knowing women’s long-term desires (than women are at knowing men’s long-term desires) is interesting because females traditionally score higher than males on myriad areas of social functioning such as emotional intelligence,43 social intelligence,44 interpersonal intelligence,45 nonverbal reading ability,46 and communication-decoding ability47—among others.
Several reasons may account for the sex differences found in this study, but we think two of them, presented here, are the most relevant. First, given the notoriously discriminating nature of females’ choices in mate selection (in humans as well as most other sexually reproducing species48), there may be particularly strong pressure on males to essentially get it right. That is, it should be particularly useful for males (more so than for females) to be accurate in their judgments of the desires of the opposite sex.
Second, many evolutionists who study human mating have focused on asymmetries across the sexes in costs associated with making poor choices in mate selection. Owing to the nature of internal fertilization and the relatively high costs associated with parenting that tax females more than males, female mating psychology should be particularly designed to reduce errors in choosing poorly in the mating domain. In short, it may pay females to overestimate the degree to which “men are all pigs.” Males, compared with females, are more likely to demonstrate short-term strategies in mating. For instance, males are more likely to report wanting many sexual partners and are more likely to enter short-term relationships with partners that they judge as less desirable for long-term mating compared with females.49 Given these features of male mating psychology, females may be more able to rely on a simple heuristic, such as “only cares about sex,” compared with males in making opposite-sex judgments.
This tendency to overestimate males’ focus on sexuality may be the flip side of the commitment-skepticism bias.50 This bias is exactly the kind of psychological proclivity that would reduce the likelihood of costly mate-choice errors for females. If females tend to employ this bias very strongly and consistently, it makes sense that their judgments of males’ desires are in contrast to males’ actual desires. This bias leads to an erroneous overestimation.
In fact, when considering females’ patterns of errors in the current study, one might say that they demonstrated a “males are always pigs” bias. Regardless of whether they were making judgments of males’ long or short-term preferences, they showed a strong tendency to overestimate the degree to which males desired the relatively sexual and promiscuous option (see Tables 6.1 and 6.2). Such a bias is consistent with the idea that women may be employing a simple heuristic suggesting that men “just want sex”—regardless of the temporal context. In other words, women tend to think that men only care about sex for both short-term casual partners and for long-term partners. Although this bias may have accounted for the fact that females scored as less accurate than males overall, it may well be an adaptive strategy in the long run—women using such a decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-relationship-seeking males (an outcome that would be very beneficial for women given the asymmetry in parental investment that typifies our species).51
Beyond adaptive biases, mating intelligence includes evolutionarily appropriate processes that are honed for accuracy. To the extent that women are more likely than men on average to be long-term mating strategists,52 it would be beneficial for men to be particularly attuned to the long-term desires of women. Similarly, to the extent that men are more likely to be short-term strategists on average,53 it makes sense that women should be particularly astute in cognitive processes connected to the short-term mating psychology of males. So, when it comes to cross-sex mind-reading, male and female strengths match male and female mating psychology—supporting the idea that mating intelligence partly depends on one’s sex. This research also shows that an evolutionary perspective is integral to helping us understand the nature of human mating intelligence. The next chapter delves further into the social psychology of mating intelligence—with an eye toward helping us better understand deception in the world of mating.