Any friendly gesture from a woman turns a man into a horny beast. And this is not an issue of movies: a new research to be published in the journal "Psychological Science" shows that this is the rule in daily life. Men were found not to be able to make the slightest difference between a friendly greeting, like the smile of a woman, and sexual advances. They appear to be blind to non-verbal clues.
"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who
are being friendly and women who are interested in something more. This 'lost in translation' phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70% of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on," said lead author Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
We could add that the remaining 30% of the women were just not interested in the "offer". And this does not explain the male behavior of "hump them all". In many cases, men take as friendly women's sexual signals. They just do not observe or decode the subtle non-verbal behavior.
The research team investigated non-verbal communication in a poll of 280 undergraduates, men and women, with an average age of 20. The subjects had to classify the images of women on a computer screen as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. The overall results showed that women were more precise than men in determining the real meaning of facial expression.
Men translated friendly gestures into sexual interest in a much higher percentage compared to women, while being confused by sexual signals, in many cases decoded just as friendly. It appears that a woman, in the end, must approach directly a man, rather than flashing signals. Men were not even able to make the difference between sadness and rejection.
One theory says that even if men and women use behavioral clues for signaling sexual interest, men have a lower interpretation limit, while women, more interested in stable relationships than flings, ask for more evidence before admitting a signal as showing real sexual interest. But the fact that men take sexual advances as being just friendly shows they are completely blind to non-verbal clues.
Many factors could explain this, like "socialization, gender roles and gender stereotypes. Women are supposed to be the communicators, concerned with relationships and others ... men are supposed to be constantly alert for sexual opportunities," Pamela McAuslan, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, told LiveScience.
The fact that men can learn these clues is showed by the fact that elder men do not "miss" so many opportunities as their younger counterparts. And even amongst the subjects of the study, some men were really skilled at reading the clues (they should have further investigated their sexuality), while some women were as "blind" as ... a man.
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