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173General discussion10not 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 sex,ual 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 in,stead 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 detect,ing 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, participantswere more reliable in detecting attraction when the people presented in thevideos were attracted to their partner. To examine whether this differencewas due to the emotional expressions of the daters, I coded the emotionalexpressions of the daters in the 9-second videos for flirting cues (e.g., coysmiles) and examined whether they differed between daters that were interested in their partner or not. Our results suggested that subtle expressionsindicating attraction differed depending on whether daters were interestedin their partner. This finding combined with the ability of the participantsto detect attraction when the daters were interested in their partner, mightindicate that subtle expressions of attraction are detectable and can be usedin decision-making. However, an alternative explanation could be that participants were biased due to the dating context and tended to indicate thatthe daters were interested in their partner more often than not. Overall, thefindings of these experiments show that, in contrast with previous studies(Place et al., 2009), detecting attraction might not be as straightforward as,for example, detecting basic emotions.In Chapter 7 (Figure 1; green and blue arrow), I focused on sexdifferences in the sexual overperception bias. To this end, we commentedon the work of Lee et al. (2020). In their speed-dating study, theauthors found that projection of own interest, self-rated attractiveness, andsociosexual orientation mediated the relationship between sex and sexualoverperception. They interpreted these findings as evidence that thereare no sex differences in sexual overperception. Therefore, they arguedthat the explanation proposed by the Error Management Theory (EMT;Haselton, 2003; Haselton & Buss, 2000), that sexual overperception isadaptive for men as it increases the chances of reproduction, is incorrect.In our commentary, we proposed that their interpretation relies on aproximate level to disprove an explanation on the ultimate level, based onthe “proximate-ultimate distinction” by Tinbergen (1963). In short, weexplain that if, for example, we discovered that male birds sing because ofan increase in testosterone levels, it would not contradict the simultaneousexplanation that male birds sing as a means of courtship. Similarly, the factthat men tend to project their own interest more onto their partners, doesnot contradict the fact that this projection could serve as a mechanism toenhance their chances of attracting additional partners. Furthermore, theeffects described by Lee et al. (2020) describe a perfect mediation betweensex and overperception by means of the projection of own interest. Lee etal. (2020) interpret this as evidence that sex, therefore, is not informative orrelevant in the model. On the contrary, in our interpretation, the projectionof own interest is the mechanism by which the effect is manifested. Sincethe projection of own interest is more likely to occur in men, sex is still animportant factor in the theoretical model. Finally, we proposed that EMTwould benefit by incorporating the proximate mechanisms described in Leeet al. (2020).Iliana Samara 17x24.indd 173 08-04-2024 16:37