14 DAY TRIAL // Psychologists from the University of Texas in Austin (UTA) say that individuals looking for mates are experiencing a type of self-deception that may, oddly enough, increase their chances at playing the mating game successfully.
For starters, women have been proven to constantly underestimate the amount of interest men have in them. At the same time, men who are good-looking have the exact same tendency, of underestimating the interest women may show in them.
Conversely, men who are not that good-looking, or who are only looking for a fling, tend to over-perceive women's interest in them, making themselves out to be nearly perfect. UTA experts say that all these behaviors are forms of self-deception.
The investigation also confirms the conclusions of other studies, which demonstrated that men are largely oblivious and unable to compute subtle nonverbal clues coming from women. A subtle smile is only interpreted as a call to have intercourse, with no other values being assigned except this.
These conclusions were drawn after researchers recruited 96 young men and 103 young women, all aged from 18 to 24. The participants were put through a speed meeting experiment, where each had only three minutes to talk to a person of the opposite sex before moving on to another.
Each test subject underwent a total of 5 such discussions. Afterwards, they were all asked to rate their discussion partners' attractiveness, as well as the others' interest in having an affair. In other words, the students were asked to judge how much the other persons wanted them.
As a rule of thumb, men tended to overestimate the amount of interest women had in them. Men who proclaimed themselves to be attractive, and those who were only interested in flings, proved to be the most likely to overestimate how much women were interested in them.
On the other hand, the men who were rated as being attractive by women had a tendency to underestimate the appeal they had to the opposite sex. Weirdly, the more attractive a woman was rated by her conversation partner, the more likely she was to underestimate her own appeal, LiveScience reports.
“There are two ways you can make an error as a man. Either you think, 'Oh, wow, that woman's really interested in me' – and it turns out she's not. There's some cost to that,” UTA psychologist Carin Perilloux says. He was a researcher on the new study.
But the second type of error is more severe. “She's interested, and he totally misses out. He misses out on a mating opportunity,” the expert says. As such, it made sense for men to evolve a tendency to overestimate the interest they trigger in women, just to err on the side of caution.
“This pattern of results may reflect a suite of adaptations designed to promote positive illusions among lower-quality men,” the UTA team explains in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.