Image heavily modified from Scott Meyer’s excellent (hope he doesn’t sue) and particularly-appropriate-for-the-occasion “Basic Instructions” comic.

This post is about detecting the differences in levels of attraction between individuals who’ve just met. The image above isn’t just a shameless cut-out from a Scott Meyer comic, it illustrates a point I’ll get to further down. So take a good look and read on.

Via ResearchBlogging, a post at the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest Blog says

[U]sing footage of couples on speed-dates… [f]ifty-four students observed dozens of 10-, 20- or 30-second clips of real speed dating interactions and attempted to say in each case whether each person was romantically interested in the other.

The researchers had access to the daters’ real decisions about whether they were interested in any of their speed dates, and were able to compare these with the students’ judgements.

The students performed more accurately than would be expected had they simply been guessing. They judged the interest of the male daters with 61 per cent accuracy and the female daters with 58 per cent accuracy. Their accuracy was unaffected by the length of each clip, but was higher when the clip was taken from the middle or the end of a dating interaction. Students currently in a romantic relationship outperformed those who weren’t.

Read the quote in context here.

That’s actually pretty interesting, leaving aside the evident heteronormativity of the research anyway. I’m guessing we’ve all been in that sort of situation where we see two people interacting and it’s almost instantly obvious that they’re interested in each other. And yet even days or weeks later you can find each soliloquizing about the other, wondering whether the other even remembers. Same, of course, for less optimal situations where it’s clear one’s interested and the other’s not. And it’s cool to find out people can tell in as little as 10 seconds.

Or, sort of.

Approximately 60% accuracy isn’t random at all, but 60% accuracy also makes one pretty darn glad we don’t go in so much for yentas and other forms of mandatory matchmakers any more.

Sadly the study, by Skylar S. Place of Indiana University and colleagues... or perhaps just the report on the study (I can’t tell since firewalled research papers are prohibitively expensive to ordinary shmoes like me)... falls down when it comes to analysis. (Emphasis mine.)

The fact the students were less accurate when judging the romantic interest of females compared with males was just as the researchers had predicted. Place’s team said it made sense for women to “behave more covertly and ambiguously” because there is more at stake for them in making a potential mating choice. By hiding their romantic interest, the researchers argued, women are able to give themselves more time to evaluate a potential partner before revealing their feelings.

Sooo you’re probably expecting me to unload here about how if one is going to do science trying to justify stereotypes it’s a bit of a stretch to assume men don’t have feelings, or reasons to hide them, when they’re meeting someone for the first time. Or that those reasons would be better than women’s reasons for hiding theirs. Or you might expect me to grumble about the assumption that, whatever some imaginary “state of nature” might have been, contemporary western men’s investment in long-term partnerships is really significantly less than women’s?

You might expect me to scowl textually at descriptive words like “covert” and “ambiguous” and other terms that stereotypically imply disingenuousness or perfidy in women and, by implication, honesty and forthrightness in men.

You might expect me to foghorn on about how the slight differences could be attributed to a no-sex class reticence on the part of women, or, even better, hint that maybe because we’re all predisposed to the no-sex class paradigm where it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to show sexual interest that the research subjects were predisposed to judge less subtle signs of interest as disinterest.

Eh. You probably were expecting me to say something just like that. Which is kind of cool because it would mean you’re starting to get it and so I don’t have to say it so much! :-)

Nah.

Instead I just wanted to see if you noticed the difference in the background color in that comic up top. Perfectly obvious eh? Wha…? Not so obvious? But I’d predicted based on theory that you’d have noticed that the background color on the left was 58% saturated and the background color on the right was 61% saturated! Go look again, because while I might have had other, credible things to say about the study I was going to base my analysis of my results on the fact that a 58% to 61% difference, though measurable, was really really significant! No?

But… but… but… the woman’s on the fifty-eight percent side! Doesn’t that make a huge difference now? And the man’s on the sixty-one percent side? Now can you see?

Gee, I guess “measurable difference” and “significant difference” don’t mean exactly the same thing.

—-

My point here isn’t to knock the basic research. It really is cool that people can tell, with somewhat better than random frequency, when two individuals are interested in each other based on just a few seconds of observation. And it would be really cool, actually, to conduct a study where accuracy was judged over time… because I’d be curious to know whether accuracy tended to decline during longer observation intervals. (I’d be inclined to guess yes because observers would tend to start overthinking and otherwise bringing in more complex culture-based analysis rather than pure reflex body-language judgment.)

But to conduct the experiment in order to confirm a hypothesis that women are harder to read than men because ? And get just a couple of percentage points difference overall? I probably wouldn’t brag about that.