Researchers from Murdoch University have found that not being able to see someone clearly is no deterrent for a male suitor, whereas women prefer to err on the side of caution.
Working with colleagues in the US and Czech Republic, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology Dr David Lewis led the study that looked at how people perceive potential mates under conditions of uncertainty.
To test whether people make biased errors in their first impressions, Dr Lewis and his team showed participants blurred images of other people and asked them to indicate how attractive they thought they were.
They then showed the participants clear images of the same people, and again asked them to rate their attractiveness.
Co-author Kortnee Evans, also from Murdoch, said they discovered that when making judgments based on incomplete information, such as when you can’t see a person clearly – as might occur in a nightclub or bar – men, on average, overperceived women’s attractiveness.
“Women, on the other hand, did the opposite – when they viewed men under conditions of uncertainty, on average they tended to underestimate the men’s attractiveness,” Ms Evans said.
“At the core of Error Management Theory is the idea that, in the real world, we almost never have complete or 100 per cent certain information,” he said.
“And because we almost always make judgments based on uncertain information, we often make errors.”
Dr Lewis explained that for any judgment, there are two possible errors, the first is called a “false alarm”, such as when you jump out of the way of a snake that turns out to be just a bobtail lizard.
The other type of error is called a “miss”, for example believing that there is no snake on the ground next to you when there actually is one.
“For any decisions like these where the costs of one possible error were greater than the cost of the other error, evolution can shape our mind to be biased toward making the less costly error,” Dr Lewis said.
“For example, when people are on the top of a cliff or other surface that they could fall from, they consistently overestimate how high they are.
“This serves an evolutionary function — if we thought we were at a height that wasn’t dangerous to fall from, we might be more likely to engage in behaviour that resulted in injury or death.”
Ms Evans elaborated: “We have similar biases when estimating how close a rapidly approaching sound is to us, which could have helped with predator avoidance in evolutionary environments, as well as when making judgments about whether a particular food is safe to eat, whether someone we’re speaking to has sinister intentions, and whether someone is interested in us as a potential partner.”
In the context of making judgments about others’ physical attractiveness – an important motivator of approach or avoidance behaviour – evolution could have shaped men to have an ‘overperception bias’ and women to have an ‘underperception bias’.
“On average, for men, missed mating opportunities were costlier than regrettable mating decisions,” Ms Evans said.
“For women, on the other hand, regrettable mating decisions would have been costlier than missed mating opportunities.
“This is largely due to the large investment required from women – but not from men – for successful reproduction.
“Across our species’ deep evolutionary history, this would have meant nine months of pregnancy, which almost always would have been followed by multiple years of lactation and breast-feeding,”.
These biases could also play out in modern society, having a profound impact on social interactions such as online dating.
