Sexual perception—that is, perceiving someone’s level of sexual interest in a particular person at a particular point in time—is a common, difficult, and potentially consequential task. Most of the time, a man’s misperception of a woman’s level of sexual interest will be a minor but potentially embarrassing social error, in which he either perceives a woman to be more interested than she actually is or perceives a woman to be less interested than she actually is. More importantly, however, sexual misperception also is associated both theoretically and empirically with an increased likelihood of sexually coercive and aggressive behavior toward acquaintances, whether indexed by a self-reported history of aggression or endorsement of rape-supportive attitudes (for more recent reviews of this extensive empirical literature, see Abbey, Jacques-Tiura, & LeBreton, 2011, and Farris, Treat, Viken, & McFall, 2008a). Standardized social-perception tasks using numerous, well-characterized, full-body photographs of college women allow examination of both nomothetic and idiographic aspects of sexual perception—that is, both average (i.e., nomothetic) sexual perception and individual differences in (i.e., idiographic) sexual perception—under highly controlled conditions. To date, work under these conditions has focused primarily on characteristics of the women being perceived and of the men doing the perceiving when accounting for variability in sexual perception. The current study extends prior research by rigorously evaluating the role of the social-environmental context in sexual perception while controlling for women’s nonverbal affect, the perceived provocativeness of women’s clothing, and women’s normative attractiveness, as well as their interactions.
Nomothetic aspects of sexual perception
On average, college men base judgments of a woman’s momentary sexual interest in a full-body photograph on multiple characteristics of the woman, such as her nonverbal affect, the perceived provocativeness of her clothing style, and her normative attractiveness (Treat, Church, & Viken, under review; Treat, Viken, Farris, & Smith, in press). Affective cues presumably are the most valid nonverbal indicators of a woman’s current level of sexual interest in a particular person because they fluctuate from moment to moment and can be unidirectional (i.e., directed at a specific person). Figure 1 depicts five women whose momentary sexual interest ranges from extremely rejecting (on the left), through neutral (in the middle), to extremely sexually interested (on the right), as judged by both undergraduate women and experts in sexual perception (see “Methods” for further detail). Inspection of these photos suggests that nonverbal affect is communicated both on a woman’s face and in her body posture, highlighting the utility and greater ecological validity of relying on full-body photographs rather than head shots when studying sexual perception.
In contrast to affective cues, non-affective cues, such as clothing style and attractiveness, provide far less information about a woman’s momentary level of sexual interest because they typically are quite stable across a social interaction and tend to be more omnidirectional (i.e., available to everyone in the social environment). Not surprisingly, men rely heavily on women’s nonverbal affective cues when judging women’s current sexual interest: two recent studies have documented that men’s sexual-interest judgments showed impressively strong associations with women’s nonverbal affective cues (ds = 2.79, 3.35; Treat et al., in press, under review). Note that Cohen’s d values indicate the magnitude of the two effects, where values of 0.2, 0.5, and 0.8 are considered to be small, moderate, and large effects in the psychological literature (Cohen, 1992). Non-affective characteristics of women also non-neglibly predict men’s judgments, however, over and above affective characteristics: in the same two studies, men’s sexual-interest judgments were moderately associated with women’s clothing style (ds = 0.78 and 0.65) and strongly associated with women’s attractiveness (ds = 0.94 and 1.16; Treat et al., in press, under review). In other words, the average participant judged women who were dressed provocatively and were more normatively attractive to be feeling much more sexually interested than other women at a specific moment in time, even when the women’s nonverbal expression of sexual interest was held constant. Particularly the reliance on attractiveness when judging women’s momentary affect may reflect projection of the affect of the male perceiver onto the female being perceived in a manner that is consistent with the perceiver’s interpersonal goals (Maner et al., 2005; Maner, Miller, Moss, Leo, & Plant, 2012). Regardless, it is easy to imagine how reliance on women’s dress and attractiveness when judging women’s fluctuating feelings could set the stage for unwanted advances.
An extensive social psychological literature demonstrates that emotional perception does not occur in a decontextualized manner. Rather, contextual information in the body and in the social environment typically is encoded along with emotion in faces (e.g., Barrett & Kensinger, 2010; de Gelder et al., 2006; Kret & de Gelder, 2010, 2012; Kret, Roelofs, Stekelenburg, & de Gelder, 2013; Van den Stock, Righart, & de Gelder, 2007). Consistent with a “congruence hypothesis”, contexts that are more, rather than less, congruent with particular emotional interpretations facilitate and speed those interpretations (e.g., Aviezer, Hassin, Bentin, & Trope, 2008; Kret & de Gelder, 2010, 2012). This makes it critically important for researchers to examine social and emotional perception in a contextualized manner.
A recent study suggests that the sexual and dating relevance of the socio-environmental context also shape men’s perceptions of women’s sexual interest (Treat, Viken, & Summers, 2015b). Twenty-eight scenes were constructed that depicted social environments that were either lower in sexual relevance (e.g., sidewalk, class, office reception area) or higher in sexual relevance (e.g., bar, house party, or bedroom). A full-body photograph of one of 14 college-aged women was inserted into two scenes that varied in sexual relevance; the women all expressed neutral-to-positive affect and varied in provocativeness of dress and attractiveness. College men viewed each scene and judged how sexually interested and friendly each woman felt on Likert scales. Consistent with a congruence hypothesis, sexually relevant contexts potentiated men’s judgments of women’s sexual interest to a far greater degree than men’s judgments of women’s friendliness (ds = 1.75, 0.33, respectively). This suggests that the sexual relevance of the environmental context may be another omnidirectional cue on which college-aged men rely when evaluating how sexually interested women are feeling.
This prior work was limited in several respects, however (Treat, Farris, Viken, & Smith, 2015a). First, participants were asked to make judgments of only a small number of women and scenes. Thus, we were unable to estimate the extent to which each participant relied independently on each of the four stimulus dimensions of primary psychological interest when making his sexual-interest judgments. We also were unable to examine the associations between reliance on each of these dimensions and relevant individual-difference variables, such as endorsement of rape-supportive attitudes. Second, Treat et al. (2015b) focused exclusively on men’s perceptions of women’s non-negative affect (i.e., the most “negative” affect displayed was neutral rather than sad or rejecting). Ideally, however, we would characterize individual differences in men’s reliance on a broader range of affective cues when judging women’s sexual interest, particularly given the relevance of men’s perceptions of women’s negative affect to the initiation and cessation of unwanted sexual advances. Third, Treat et al. (2015b) did not specify the time period over which participants judged women’s sexual interest. It would be preferable to obtain judgments of women’s momentary sexual interest, however, as this would render clothing style, attractiveness, and the social environment far less plausible indicators than the fluctuating nonverbal information on the face and in the body.
The current study extends this prior work by developing and evaluating men’s judgments of a much larger set of unique scenes for which affect, clothing style, attractiveness, and contextual sexual relevance vary independently. Affective variability also ranges from extremely rejecting to extremely sexually interested. This allows us to obtain simultaneous but independent estimates of both woman-specific and context-specific influences on the full spectrum of men’s judgments of women’s sexual interest. We also ask participants to judge how sexually interested the woman is feeling “right now”, which isolates men’s judgments of women’s momentary sexual interest.
Further, we evaluate for the first time in a continuous-rating paradigm whether these four cues influence sexual perception in only an additive fashion (i.e., as main effects only) or potentially in a multiplicative fashion. We have observed such multiplicative effects in much of our prior sexual-perception work in which participants have classified the woman’s affect (e.g., sexually interested, friendly, sad, or rejecting) rather than judging the woman’s affect on a continuous-rating scale, as in the current work. For example, men’s sensitivity to women’s sexual interest is potentiated when women are dressed provocatively or are normatively attractive, whereas men’s sensitivity to women’s rejection is potentiated when women are dressed conservatively or are normatively unattractive (Farris, Treat, Viken, & McFall, 2008b; Farris, Viken, & Treat, 2010; Farris, Viken, Treat, & McFall, 2006; Smith, Treat, Farmer, & McMurray, under review; Treat et al., 2015a). In other words, sensitivity to particular affective cues is enhanced when more congruent levels of non-affective cues are present, consistent with the congruence hypothesis cited above regarding contextual influences on emotion perceptions (Aviezer et al., 2008; Kret & de Gelder, 2010, 2012). In the context of the current continuous-rating paradigm, these robust findings suggest that reliance on affect might be potentiated by provocative clothing style, attractiveness, and sexually relevant contexts.
Idiographic aspects of sexual perception
Marked individual differences in the basis of men’s judgments about women’s momentary sexual interest also emerge across studies. Consistent with contemporary models of sexual aggression between acquaintances (Abbey et al., 2011), men who focus less than their peers on women’s nonverbal affective cues when judging women’s momentary sexual interest endorse more rape-supportive attitudes, placing them at greater risk of exhibiting sexually coercive or aggressive behavior (ds = −0.43, −0.36, respectively; Treat et al., in press, under review). Moreover, men who focus more than their peers on women’s attractiveness when judging how sexually interested women feel also are at greater risk (ds = 0.32, 0.40, respectively; Treat et al., in press, under review), raising the possibility that higher-risk men are more likely than lower-risk men to conflate their own affective response to a woman with the woman’s expressed affect (Maner et al., 2005, 2012). Given these findings, it is perhaps unsurprising that high-risk men report misperceiving women’s friendliness as sexual interest more than their peers (e.g., Abbey, 1987; Jacques-Tiura, Abbey, Parkhill, & Zawacki, 2007). Interestingly, individual differences in the influence of sexually relevant contexts on men’s sexual-interest judgments correlated positively with the reported frequency of misperception experiences (Treat et al., 2015b). Overall, therefore, variability in the basis of men’s sexual-perception judgments may be associated with risk for coercive or aggressive behavior, perhaps secondary to misperception of sexual-consent cues or to frustration in response to a woman’s seemingly capricious change in her level of sexual interest (Abbey et al., 2011; Farris et al., 2008b).
The current study advances our understanding of idiographic aspects of sexual perception by evaluating the relation of rape-supportive attitudes, a well-established correlate of sexually aggressive behavior (Murnen, Wright, & Kaluzny, 2002), with reliance on affect, clothing style, attractiveness, and contextual sexual relevance when judging women’s momentary sexual interest. This affords a first look at whether those at greater risk of displaying sexually aggressive behavior focus more than their peers on contextual sexual relevance, as they do attractiveness (Treat et al., in press, under review). We also obtain estimates of the attitudinal links with reliance on the other three woman-specific dimensions when using more ecologically valid scene stimuli. Furthermore, we evaluate for the first time the bivariate (pairwise) correlations of cue-utilization values across participants (i.e., the six associations between all possible pairs of the four cue-utilization values). Pairwise correlations between reliance on context and each of the three woman-specific dimensions tell us whether reliance on each cue is relatively independent of reliance on the other cues or whether there are meaningful relations between reliance on two or more cues. For example, men who rely relatively more on affective information when judging women’s sexual interest might rely less on attractiveness information and vice versa. Ultimately, such analyses may provide a useful perspective on the underlying structure of men’s judgments of women’s nonverbal dating-relevant cues.
Finally, the current study characterizes men’s self-reported cue-utilization patterns. The association between self-reported and observed cue utilization tells us about the extent to which the average participant is aware of the cues on which he relies when judging women’s momentary sexual interest. Non-negligible awareness would suggest that cue-utilization patterns might be more responsive to deliberate efforts on the part of participants to modify them, perhaps secondary to explicit instruction about the relative validity of the cues for determining women’s momentary affect (Treat et al., under review). Male participants in a prior study reported their use of affect, clothing style, and attractiveness cues after completing the sexual-interest judgment task. Moderate-to-large associations with observed cue utilizations emerged (rs = 0.47, 0.25, 0.39, respectively; Treat et al., under review). The current study extends this work by obtaining self-reported estimates of focus on contextual sexual relevance in addition to the other three dimensions. We also examine the association of rape-supportive attitudes with self-reported cue utilizations so that we can determine whether higher-risk men are aware of their presumably decreased focus on affect and increased focus on attractiveness when judging women’s momentary affect.
In sum, the current work examines the hypotheses that environmental context, like the non-affective cues of dress and attractiveness, would affect men’s judgments of women’s sexual interest; that patterns of cue usage would be moderated by risk for sexual aggression; that utilization of affective cues would be moderated by non-affective cues present in the stimuli; and that men would have some degree of awareness of their patterns of cue usage.