Seduction Labs has frequently noted that subjects such as Body Language are pseudo-psychological mumbo jumbo, and now it seems that science is catching up with our opinion.
An interesting piece of research turned up recently, which, possibly due to some shallow reporting, was generally criticised as “man bashing“, although that seems to be a straw man, allowing Body Language experts to avoid facing up to some inconvenient information.
According to the paper “Decoding Women’s Sexual Intent“, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, Coreen Farris and colleagues, of Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, examined non-verbal communication in a mixed group of 280 heterosexual undergraduates.
Volunteers viewed images of women on a computer screen and then had to categorize each as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Then, each volunteer reported on 280 photographs, which had been previously sorted into one of the above categories, based on surveys completed by different groups of people.
When it came to friendly gestures, men were more likely than women to interpret these to mean sexual interest. But, men also interpreted sexual cues as friendly interest. According to the researchers, this is because men have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.
The results, which were widely reported as men are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of women’s non-verbal cues, also showed that whilst women were more precise in categorizing the facial expressions correctly overall, the women’s results were only slightly better than the men’s.
Lead researcher Coreen Farris said:
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.
It had been previously suggested that both men and women would be aware of the same behavioural cues, but men would tend to have a lower threshold for what qualifies as sexual interest, whereas women, presumably more interested in a stable relationship, would wait for compelling evidence before labelling behaviour as sexual interest.
However, Farris and her colleagues found that this wasn’t the case, since men also had difficulties discerning the difference between sadness and rejection.
Now, it is frequently noted that women tend to be better communicators that men, so it is therefore unsurprising that women scored slightly higher in their categorizations compared to men. What is more interesting is that both genders achieved such low accuracy.
Therefore, if there were solid foundations for claims made by students of Body Language, we would see both genders accurately identifying the non-verbal cues at high rates, especially in a controlled laboratory environment, where participants only needed to differentiate between four possible states, and not the multitude of conditions that they would be faced with in the real world.
The idea of being able to detect non-verbal cues is an interesting one, and would certainly be valuable, were there some reasonable evidence to support it. Please note that here we are not disputing the fact that most people can identify general gross states from facial expressions (happy, worried, upset, angry, etc.). However, amongst more subtle (often likely to be suppressed) cues, one would need to have seen a stable baseline of past cues, in order to learn to correctly identify the corresponding state. Some states are very closely related, so it appears perfectly logical to assume that if some sort of non-verbal communication channel were open, a ‘friendly’ message would accompany or precede a ‘sexually interested’ message.
In the case of women being sexually interested in a man, there will be extreme variation in how this is likely to be expressed, since there is no such thing as a standard women: Some women will be strongly expressive, giving hugs and kisses, and possibly touching a man more intimately, whilst others will be less expressive and even conceal the fact that they are interested in a man, for fear that he, will brand her ‘easy‘ or a ‘slut‘. Similarly, other people will express non-sexual friendliness with hugs and kisses. Alcohol or environmental factors may also come into play, with a woman possibly feeling more inhibited amongst large groups, and thus not being as expressive as when alone, alternatively alcohol consumption may cause her to become less inhibited.
Some women may choose to display what they believe are signals of sexual interest, in the hope that she will avoid consequences for some transgression. The same signals might also profitably be used by a woman attempting to gain material benefits from a man, if she believes that he will dispense resources, after a false show of sexual interested in him.
A woman may show initial sexual interested in a man, but quickly change her mind, as new information or better options becomes available. In this case, from a male perspective, the man will conclude that she is “blowing hot and cold“, since the woman is unlikely to disclose the source of information which caused her change of mind, in case it were to cause severe disappointment or reprisal.
Women are also frequently reported as being ambiguous in their verbal communication, so a woman could state “I’m not in the mood right now“. This statement is not outright refusal, but is essentially an unlimited open ended statement. In other words, “…not [...] right now” could reasonably represent anytime from a few minutes in the future to many years away, and could therefore represent anything from token resistance to a veiled brush off.
The above descriptions should amply illustrate why the hypothetical non-verbal route does not work. There is no stable baseline to compare signals with, and thus correlate a response, further, were it even possible that such a communication route existed, a man would then always fall prey to a woman displaying deceptive signals.
Now, since women tend to deliberately avoid initiating contact with men they are interested in, the responsibility for initial contact must therefore fall to men. Thus, given that misinterpreting a ‘sexually interested’ signal for a ‘friendly’ signal would prevent the man from enjoying sexual relations with the woman, there is therefore a high associated cost of failure to incorrectly interpreted signals. Thus, the obvious answer for the man is to always assume sexual interest, until clearer signals indicate otherwise.
Finally, if a heterosexual man desired to go the theatre, eat in a restaurant, enjoy some drinks or engage in any other similar activity typically undertaken on a “Date”, he could almost certainly call upon a network of male friends, family or co-workers to accompany him. Thus, if a man goes out with a woman that he is not familiar with, there is clearly sexual interest by both parties; since sex is the only activity that he cannot take part in, with male friends.
One only has to look at the number of internet dating profiles that contain some variation on the phrase “Let’s be friends first“.
The original research paper can be downloaded here:
Posted by Jonathan in Psychology, Sociology