In the common scenario of a conversation between a man and a woman in which the latter is interested in the subject, smiles and is friendly, what he believes is that there is a sexual interest. Does it sound familiar to you? On the contrary, the situation is the same: a man who is sexually attracted to a woman he has just met and shows her various signs but she thinks that he is only trying to be nice. Both men and women misinterpret these ‘signals’ or ‘clues’ of the opposite sex , according to a study by the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) and collected in the journal Evolutionary Psychology .
One of the topics that evolutionary psychologists are especially interested in is the sexual psychology of gender across cultures and social groups . “The reproductive fitness of a man, that is, the amount of offspring he produces, depends on the number of women he is able to impregnate. But that attitude does not work for women,” explains Mons Bendixen, co-author of the study. In fact, the risk of a pregnancy with the consequent childbirth, breastfeeding and raising it, has made the psychology of women – through thousands of generations – have evolved to set the highest bar; which means that women need much clearer signals than men before considering sexual intercourse.
For their study, the researchers had 308 heterosexual participants (59% of them female) aged between 18 and 30 years. Half of the women and 40% of the men were dating at the time of the study. All of them carried out a questionnaire with identical questions to the study carried out in the USA in 2003 with the same purpose. The results were identical to those of the American study: both men and women explained that their social signals were misinterpreted by the other , but in the case of men, these were the ones who most often misinterpreted the signals.
” The results are not a surprise , viewed from an evolutionary perspective. What is fascinating is that our results are identical to a study conducted in the US, even though Norway is one of the countries more sexually liberal than most. in gender equality in the world. This fact weakens alternative allegations that the social roles of men and women in different cultures determine their psychology in these situations “, clarifies Bendixen.
