It’s an agreed upon fact among academics that men over-perceive women’s sexual intent to make sure they’re not missing out on any mating opportunities. Survival of the fittest sometimes privileges the ego.
In a particularly eye-roll inducing study, men were more likely to think their female friends were into them while women under-perceived their male friends’ interest. But when it was revealed that friends did, in fact, like their friends of the opposite sex, the women felt that this fact had far more bearing than the men did. The men shrugged it off while the women dwelled on it.
In a study from Stanford University, researchers were able to more accurately determine if a heterosexual pair was flirting with a “flirtation detection system,” rather than the people who actually experienced the conversation. The subjects went on a series of speed dates, and then rated whether or not they were flirting and if they thought the other person was flirting with them. After that, the researchers pored through the audio recorded during the date and created an automated system that divided up the linguistic elements of the conversation — all the vocabulary, the pauses, the inflections.
In the end, the system beat the humans. The system could tell with 71.5 percent accuracy if the women were flirting with men, the men were only correct 56.2 percent of the time. Women were closer to the course — they were 62.2 percent accurate, while the system was 69 percent accurate.
