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You walk into a bar with your friends. A hot girl is smiling at your buddy from across the room. Right away, he thinks: She wants to have sex with me!
True? Or is it all in his head?
Chances are… he’s dead wrong. Research has shown men have a tendency to misjudge a woman’s sexual intent, especially after he’s had a few things to drink. (Blame it on the alcohol!)
However a new study went a step further than booze and into personality. A man’s attachment style – whether he wants or fears intimacy – also plays into how he reads a woman’s sexual interest.
Researchers asked nearly 500 men to imagine a scenario in which an attractive woman at a nightclub catches their eye. The woman notices she is being stared at and smiles back.
The men were then asked to gauge the level of interest they believed the woman had for them.
Men who had a high desire for intimacy (high in attachment anxiety) were more likely to imagine a woman being sexually interested in them. Also, they project their own flirtatiousness and sexual interest onto the woman, hoping the feelings would be returned.
“If you view yourself as being flirtatious, that biases you to seeing others as behaving similarly,” said Joshua Hart, associate professor of psychology at Union College and the lead author of the study to be published in the April issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences. His co-author is Rhea Howard, a former student now at Harvard University.
On the other hand, men who fear intimacy (high in attachment avoidance) felt the opposite.
“Their lower interest in intimacy led them to be less interested in the fictional woman, thus seeing themselves as being less flirty, and in turn, imagining the woman as less sexually interested in them,” Hart said.
“We see in reality what we wish to see, not necessarily what’s there,” Hart said.
Nothing wrong with that!
[H/T: Newswise]
