Sexual Adaptation and Miscommunication in the Age of #MeToo

At one of #MeToo founder Tarana Burke’s first workshops, 30 high-school girls were asked to write “Me Too” on a sheet of paper if they wanted to anonymously record their experience of sexual harassment. Burke was stunned by how many sheets she counted; two-thirds of the girls wrote “Me Too.”

Driven by Hollywood scandals and social movements like #MeToo, growing awareness of the prevalence of sexual harassment prompts us to ask why sexual harassment is so prevalent. Is it a purely cultural phenomenon or could it be rooted in something deeper: an evolved predisposition for sexual miscommunication?

In a recent paper, Damian Murray et al. hypothesize that sexual miscommunication between men and women may have an adaptive function. Their data add nuance to prior findings that women may not accurately portray their sexual interest. One of those prior findings comes from a 2015 survey that Carin Perilloux and Robert Kurzban conducted. In this survey, female respondents reported that, after behaving flirtatiously with a man, they were more likely to say they wanted sex than they were to actually want it. Female participants also believed the same of other women, though they thought that others’ behavior would be more representative than their own.

In Perilloux and Kurzban’s survey, all respondents were asked the two questions in the same order: ‘If you behave sexually–if you kiss a man, or put a hand on his thigh–how likely are you to say that you want sex? How likely are you to actually want sex?’ Because the likelihoods reported from the “say” question were greater than those from the “want” question, Perilloux and Kurzban concluded that women over-represent their sexual interest.

Given the design of the study, Murray et. al. were concerned that the ordering of the two questions biased responses. Specifically, participants may have felt they were supposed to answer the second query differently from the first. Murray et. al. found support for their hypothesis in two surveys they created. One survey was identical to Perilloux and Kurzban’s, whereas the other survey reversed the order of the two questions, positioning the “want” question before the “say” question. Murray and colleagues recruited 414 American women from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and gave half the first survey and the remaining half the second.

Their results validated bias in the ordering of questions. When the “say” question was asked first, likelihood for the subsequent “want” question increased, and when the “want” question was asked first, likelihood for the “say” question decreased. While earlier work indicated that women over-represent their sexual interest, Murray et. al. demonstrate that we can’t determine the direction of the relationship between women’s behavior and their intentions. In other words, an asymmetry exists, but because its direction changes based on the order in which the questions are asked, the conclusion that women over-represent their sexual interests may be premature.

Neither study argues that women over-represent their sexual interest, but the authors theorize that female over-representation of interest may make men more confident. People generally find confidence attractive, and women’s over-representation of their intentions may fuel men’s confidence, making men more attractive to women. Along a similar vein, the authors theorize that men may be predisposed to overestimate female sexual interest because doing so increases their own interest. If a man thinks he has a chance to hit it off with a woman, his interest in her may increase. When the woman perceives his interest, the same thing may happen to her. Miscommunication might therefore result in the emergence of genuine sexual interest, but its consequences include sexual harassment and coercion that give rise to movements such as #MeToo and the Women’s Marches, both fighting for harassment policy reformation in the workplace.

Policymakers are taking note, and some jurisdictions are considering mandating private employers to conduct sexual harassment training. Although Murray et al.’s line of research is still too premature to inform policy design, sexual harassment in the workplace can be addressed by leveraging related avenues of evolutionary thinking. For example, because women embedded in strong female groups may feel more comfortable speaking about their harassment experiences to other women, employers might consider staffing harassment response teams with women.

Article source: Murray, D. R., Murphy, S. C., von Hippel, W., Trivers, R., & Haselton, M. G. “A Preregistered Study of Competing Predictions Suggests That Men Do Overestimate Women’s Sexual Intent.” Psychological Science, Vol 28, Issue 2. (2017): 253–255.

Featured photo: cc/(nito100, photo ID: 866106596, from iStock by Getty Images)