Reply to “A Preregistered Study of Competing Predictions Suggests That Men Do Overestimate Women’s Sexual Intent”

In our original work (Perilloux & Kurzban, 2015) critiqued by Murray, Murphy, von Hippel, Trivers, and Haselton (2017), our goal was to address an epistemic challenge posed by the finding that men report women’s sexual interest to be greater than women report their own interest to be (Haselton & Buss, 2000). From the reported sex difference alone, one cannot infer whether men overestimated, women underreported, or some combination of the two. Distinguishing among these possibilities is difficult because the truth of the matter— women’s actual sexual interest—is unknown. We were pleased to work with Murray et al. in their development of a simple but clever experiment to clarify a portion of our prior work (Perilloux & Kurzban, 2015). As did Murray et al. in their new experiment, we relied on Gricean pragmatics to get at the issue in our original experiment. By allowing participants to answer both “say” and “want” questions, we signaled that we expected participants might answer them differently, licensing them to do so. In both our work and that of Murray et al., this indeed occurred. Just as we found that women believe that women have greater sexual intentions than they say they do, so did Murray et al. We are persuaded that, contrary to what we predicted, the first question asked “anchors” responses: When the “say” question is asked first, ratings for the “want” question increase; but when the “want” question is asked first, ratings for the “say” question decrease. We take from this that women do not have specific values in mind for “say” and “want” questions. That is, women have beliefs about the ordinal relationship between actual and reported sexual intentions, but not about the cardinal values for those intentions. This conclusion, although contrary to our original view, is in line with the reasoning of Murray et al. In this reply, we wish to make three points. First, although the results Murray et al. obtained undermine our original interpretation of our result, it bears emphasizing that the findings, taken together, still cannot answer the initial research question: Is the difference between men’s and women’s answers on these scales caused by men’s overestimation, women’s underreporting, or both? On this note, our understanding of the Gricean interpretation Murray et al. advance is that participants will “differentiate” between the two questions (p. 253). Differentiation does not imply a prediction regarding direction; we think it significant that asking the “want” question first did not, as it could in principle have done, lead to increased ratings for the “say” question. Clearly, our initial research question remains open, and we look forward to Murray et al. and other scholars devoting their methodological creativity to designing methods that put both the underreporting hypothesis and the overperception hypothesis at risk of falsification. Second, there are data in the Supplemental Material provided by Murray et al. that speak, in a modest way to be sure, to this question. As Figure S2A shows, most women reported that they themselves do in fact at least sometimes act less interested than they really are when beginning to date someone new. Additionally, most women reported that they themselves never or rarely acted more interested than they actually were (Fig. S2B). These data appear to be consistent with the view that women, on average, both say and act as though they are less interested than they actually are; this leaves open the possibility that men pick up on this “coyness” and that men’s ratings therefore reflect women’s true intentions more accurately than women’s self-reported interest does. 684001 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797616684001Perilloux, KurzbanReply to Murray et al. research-article2017