She Might Be Into You, She Might Not Be
July 12, 2008 / 9:58 am • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierThen again, she might be into you. Women don’t always send clear signals. Figuring them out is part of the fun. Via a link from Conservative Grapevine, I’ve been pondering the mixed signals. The article is based on this snippet of research:
In the study, researchers tested 280 heterosexual male and female students at Indiana University in 2006 and 2007, asking them to sort 280 photos of women (all pictures were full-length shots of fully clothed subjects) into one of one of four categories — friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting.
Men who viewed images of women misidentified 12 percent of the images as sexually interested, the study found, while women mistook 8.7 percent of images.
Researchers chalk it up to women’s more developed ability to read others’ signals, and men’s tendency to oversexualize social situations or miss the message entirely.
Let me get this straight, a 4% swing makes men “oversexualize social situations or miss the message”? That seems like a tiny difference to make such sweeping generalizations. And I’m guessing that there are men who never missed and women who nearly always did and that swung the stats. Bottom line: there are people who read others better than others. And, maybe, women are generally a bit better at this than men. Maybe.
What is interesting and not that surprising is that men believe words. So when a woman says, “I’m talking with my friends”, a guy hears, “I’m talking with my friends.” Men prefer direct communication. Women think they’re being direct, but they’re often being oblique and then wonder why they are misunderstood.
Eh, great novels have been written discussing this dance. Part of it is just a mystery. Science can do all the digging they’d like, but the way of a man with a woman will never be easy to explain and that’s a good thing.
One Response to “She Might Be Into You, She Might Not Be”
July 12 2008 / 10:12 am
Reply
8.7% vs 12% is not a very big swing, especially given the small sample size (280=140 men and 140 women)…I actually thought I remembered seeing a study with a much larger effect.
Note also that both sexes were asked to evaluate the interest level for women…one possible conclusion would be that people are better at evaluating their OWN gender’s facial expressions than those of the other gender, rather than a male/female difference in evaluation ability. This possibility could easily be compensated for with a more symmnetrical study, in which men would review the pictures of women and women would review the pictures of men.