Study Shows Males Commonly Mistake Sexual Intent

seattle-pk writes "Males are apparently clueless when it comes to interpreting sexual intent from females, according to a recent study (PDF) from Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Men were found commonly to perceive more sexual intent in women's behavior than women were intending to convey. (A campus survey showed that 68% of college females had an experience where a male mistook signs of friendliness for affection.) However, the study also shows that men were quite likely to misperceive sexual interest as friendliness. 'Rather than seeing the world through sex-colored glasses, men seemed just to have blurry vision of sorts, overall,' according to the article. If you're a male who ever mistook the meaning of a barista's smile, looks like you're not alone."

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In other news...

[Eggplant62]

Mostly dark this morning turning brightly sunny then partly cloudy during the day with a slight threat of rain showers tonight. Temps will go from bitter cold early this morning to somewhat tolerable for about 5 minutes this afternoon before heading back to bitter cold again tonight.

Next week will see warming temperatures during the day, continued cold temperatures at night, and continued varying cycles of dark and light throughout the day.

That's the weather; I'm not Chevy Chase, but maybe you are.

Summary, You see what you want to

[DarkOx]

This is not new reasearch at all. My Psyc 101 prof had this same discussion with us years ago. Basically like in most other aspects of life we interpret events they we want to do it.

The human brain takes a diverse and complex set of inputs and forces a linear and seemingly, at least to itself, rational interpetation of those inputs. Most of the time our brains are similar enough that we write a fairly similar story as they next guy/gal given similar input. It also helps that a major input is social elements from our shared culture which go along way to shaping those stories. We do however remain individuals.

This entire study pretty much comes down to a few scenerios.

  1. Guy meets girl, guy has no sexual interest in girl(rare indeed :-) )
  2. Girl (is/is not) sexualy interested and acts in some favorable way toward guy beyound basic social expectations of politeness.
  3. Guy's brain attempts to make since of these inputs(it must because that is what brains do) its biased by other expectaions/desires and decides that she must want to be friends, and the story gets writen.

Or

  1. Guy meets girl, guy is attracted to girl.
  2. Girl (is/is not) sexualy interested and acts in some favorable way toward guy beyound basic social expectations of politeness.
  3. Guy's brain attempts to make since of these inputs(it must because that is what brains do) its biased by other expectaions/desires and decides that she must want to be his girl friend or at least screw and the story gets writen.

Now this is by no means scientific but I have a fair number female friends(hmm maybe some really just want sex have to check on that later) and from my observation of them and their strings of looser guys they seems behave just like men do. Conversations with them confirm this, sometimes I think if I have to listen to one more of these "so does that mean he is interested in me" conversations I might have kill them.