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

Errors in perception and judgment are inevitable, but some errors have greater costs than others. Consequently, evolution may bias cognition toward the less costly error (error-management theory; Haselton, Nettle, & Murray, 2015). For example, some researchers have claimed that men typically overestimate women’s sexual interest (Haselton & Buss, 2000) because it was less costly to men’s inclusive fitness for them to infer sexual interest that was absent (overperception) than to overlook sexual interest that was present. Other researchers, however, have argued that evolution should bias behavior but not perception or judgment (e.g., McKay & Efferson, 2010). Following in this tradition, Perilloux and Kurzban (2015) hypothesized that men’s apparent overperception of female sexual interest is an artifact of women understating their own (and other women’s) sexual interest, and that men accurately perceive sexual interest. According to this hypothesis, the gender difference in ratings of female sexual interest is not evidence of a male cognitive bias after all. Perilloux and Kurzban reported results from three studies to support this argument. The results of the first two studies are consistent with previous research. In the critical third study, female participants estimated other women’s sexual intentions (i.e., the likelihood that they intended to have sex with a man) when they engaged in various romantic behaviors with him (e.g., holding hands). Participants were asked to estimate both what other women say their sexual intentions are (“say” question) and what their sexual intentions actually are (“want” question) when they engage in these behaviors. The results indicated that participants thought other women say their sexual intentions are less than what they actually are, which led Perilloux and Kurzban to conclude that males’ sexual perceptions are accurate rather than inflated. We question this conclusion because their finding may be the combined product of question order and Gricean (Grice, 1975) language norms. Because participants were asked the “want” question after the “say” question, they might have concluded that the experimenter expected different responses to the second question (Grice, 1975). If the participants also believed that women are more likely to be coy than otherwise, they would then have given higher ratings for the “want” question than for the “say” question. One way to distinguish Perilloux and Kurzban’s interpretation from this Gricean interpretation is to reverse the question order. A Gricean interpretation predicts that women responding to the “say” question first and women responding to the “want” question first would respond identically, as they would be indicating their beliefs about what other women want. Only when one question is asked after the other would women differentiate their responses to them. In contrast, if Perilloux and Kurzban are correct, question order should be irrelevant. To investigate these competing possibilities, we conducted a preregistered experiment (see www.osf.io/5tejq/) with an online sample of women and varied the order in which Perilloux and Kurzban’s questions were asked. We predicted that responses to the “say” and “want” questions would be equivalent when they were asked first, whereas Perilloux and Kurzban confirmed their prediction that ratings for the “want” question would be higher than ratings for the “say” question regardless of the order of the questions (personal communication, April 19, 2016). 675474 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797616675474Murray et al.Estimates of Women’s Sexual Intent research-article2017