Men and Women Tend to Overestimate the Dating Competition
Posted on November 10, 2006
The Economist, which seems an unlikely source for such an article, reports that a behavior study has found that men and women tend to overestimate how attractive the competition is.
IF YOU have ever sat alone in a bar, depressed by how good-looking everybody else seems to be, take comfort-it may be evolution playing a trick on you. A study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior by Sarah Hill, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, shows that people of both sexes reckon the sexual competition they face is stronger than it really is. She thinks that is useful: it makes people try harder to attract or keep a mate.Maybe this study will make a few people feel better but if it is a natural thing to do that confidence boost may be short-lived. It may be impossible to completely override this impulse to give your competition a higher rank than they deserve once you are out in the real world. There is also an exception to this study -- those arrogant persons who seem to think they are hottest guy or girl at the party no matter what reality shows.Dr Hill showed heterosexual men and women photographs of people. She asked them to rate both how attractive those of their own sex would be to the opposite sex, and how attractive the members of the opposite sex were. She then compared the scores for the former with the scores for the latter, seen from the other side. Men thought that the men they were shown were more attractive to women than they really were, and women thought the same of the women.
Dr Hill had predicted this outcome, thanks to error-management theory-the idea that when people (or, indeed, other animals) make errors of judgment, they tend to make the error that is least costly. The notion was first proposed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, two of Dr Hill's colleagues, to explain a puzzling quirk in male psychology.
