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172Chapter 10not attracted to them. On the other hand, women were approximately 50%(i.e., chance level) accurate in detecting their partners’ attraction. Thesefindings suggest that projection might be the mechanism by which the sexualoverperception bias is manifested. In other words, the sexual overperceptionbias might occur because men tend to project their own sexual interest ontowomen they are interested in, leading them to misperceive the level of sexual interest in a potential partner. In contrast to previous literature (e.g.,A. J. Lee et al., 2020; Perilloux et al., 2012), self-rated attractiveness andtrait sexual desire did not influence overperception. However, this could bedue to the fact that previous studies measured sociosexual orientation instead of specifically sexual desire. Furthermore, previous studies measureddifferent aspects of attractiveness (e.g., physical and personality), whereaswe only examined self-rated physical attractiveness.The previous study showed that men are accurate in inferring whethertheir partner is attracted to them but only when they are not interested inthat partner. This suggests that people may be more accurate in detectingattraction when they are neutral observers. In Chapter 6 (Figure 1; yellowarrow), I examined whether third-party observers could detect attractionsin others. In Experiment 1, I presented adults and children with two briefvideos (3 sec) of people on a date and asked them to indicate whether eachperson was interested in their partner. Unbeknownst to the participants,half of the videos were presented not with their original partner but witha random partner. I expected that participants would be less accurate indetecting attraction when presented with these videos, as participants couldnot rely on cues indicating attraction. Contrary to my expectations, I didnot find this effect. Furthermore, I found that overall, participants could notaccurately detect attraction in others. As expected, children were worse thanadults at detecting attraction, especially when the daters presented were notinterested in their partners. In general, participants were better at detecting whether there is attraction when the people presented in the videos wereattracted to their partners compared to when they were not. In Experiment2, I examined whether the decreased accuracy observed in children was dueto increased cognitive load since, in Experiment 1, two video streams werepresented simultaneously. Therefore, in Experiment 2, I presented one videoat a time. As in Experiment 1, I found that overall, could not accuratelydetect attraction in others compared to chance level. This time, there wasno effect of age, as children and adults performed at chance level. Crucially,I again found that participants were able to indicate with above chance levelaccuracy the presence/absence of attraction when the daters presented wereinterested in their partners using video segments from different timeframesin a blind date. In Experiment 3, I examined whether adults could detectattraction in others with longer video segments. The results showed thatthis was not the case; the length of the video segments did not influencethe participants’ accuracy. Similar to Experiments 1 and 2, participantsIliana Samara 17x24.indd 172 08-04-2024 16:37