Just One Look--That’s About All It Takes for Some Men
When a woman smiles at a man, what does it mean? Is the smile a gesture of friendliness and warmth? Is it just a courtesy smile, the kind expressed by greeters at Wal-Mart? Or is the smile a semaphore of sexual interest, an invitation to explore carnal possibilities?
“During the day, I smile at people in general because I am a friendly person,” said Kathleen Cahill, a 29-year-old West Los Angeles production assistant who is single. “As far as smiling at men in a bar or a nightclub, I am careful because even something like a smile can give guys the wrong idea.”
Cahill’s estimation of a smile’s power and her description of its ambiguous meaning is accurate.
While most women seem to know that a smile is usually just a smile, some men tend to translate a smile as “she wants me,” according to a Princeton University study presented this month at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
The researchers, Leif Nelson and Robyn LeBoeuf, both doctoral candidates in psychology at Princeton, said that men generally overestimate a woman’s smile as a sign of sexual interest, especially men who report that their sex lives are less than fulfilling.
Women, by comparison, interpret gestures such as smiling displayed by other women and themselves as neutral, devoid of sexual innuendo.
“We theorize that what explains men’s tendency to overestimate women’s sexual interest is that first, men are generally more interested in sex than women,” said Nelson, “and second, that people tend to think that their own view is shared by others.” Nelson and LeBoeuf had 285 undergraduates read detailed descriptions of behaviors attributed to a man, a woman and to themselves in four different scenarios. After reading the scenarios, participants were asked “how likely it was that the [man, woman or the participant] was interested in sex” on a scale of 1 to 7. The scenarios included a person smiling repeatedly over the course of an evening, touching the arm of a date repeatedly, smiling at someone across a lecture hall and a person being in a bar. Men’s ratings of how interested they thought a woman in the scenarios would be in having sex were higher than both a woman’s ratings of another woman’s intent or of women’s ratings of their own intent, said Nelson.
“On average, every man in our study is overestimating a woman’s sexual interest based on smiling, touching the arm and being in a bar,” he said. “Theoretically, men are cruising around out there looking at women doing the most neutral thing--and it is hard to think of anything more neutral than smiling--and men are saying, ‘Yeah, she might be interested in having sex.’”
Nelson and LeBoeuf’s study replicated the findings of a 1982 study conducted by psychologist Antonia Abbey of Detroit’s Wayne State University, in which she videotaped men and women interacting in ordinary ways, such as talking and using hand gestures natural to conversation. An impartial observer and the two participants were then asked to rate the participants’ sexual intent. “Even hand gestures were interpreted by men as indicating that ‘the woman is coming on to me,’” said Nelson.
But Nelson and his co-researcher speculated that men whose sex lives were lacking would be more extreme in their over-perception of women’s sexual intent. To test their theory, the researchers conducted a second study with 246 undergraduates who first rated how satisfying their sex lives were and, subsequently, rated the sexual intent of men, women and themselves in the scenarios.
The results: Satisfied men were less apt to attribute sexual intentions to a woman than unsatisfied men, said Nelson, and as a consequence, perceived women smiling, touching their arm and being in a bar as less sexually interested.
Herb Goldberg, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist and expert on male psychology, said the Princeton findings are not surprising. “Men generally sexualize their relationships with women, and women generally don’t sexualize their relationships with men,” said Goldberg, author of the 1975 bestseller “The Hazards of Being Male” and the 1991 book, “What Men Really Want.” “When a man talks to a woman, especially if she is attractive--unless it is goal oriented like talking about business, asking her the time or selling her insurance--he is going to have sexual thoughts,” Goldberg said. Men are used to women ignoring them, not initiating conversations with them, not smiling at them, so when a woman does, it is an unusual event and he will think she is coming on to him, he added.
What drives men to sexualize a woman’s smile can be more than overactive libidos, argues Alon Gratch, a New York City clinical psychologist and author of the new book, “If Men Could Talk ... Translating the Secret Language of Men.”
“Many men are fundamentally insecure and always feel a need to prove their masculinity,” said Gratch. “In that sense, if a woman smiles at them, they perceive it as an affirmation of their sexual prowess and as a sign of a woman’s interest.”
Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist, cautioned against making sweeping generalizations about male behavior from a study of college men, whom she describes as “wrapped in a cloak of hormones for four years.”
Many men are married, working and busy minding a family, said Schwartz. They don’t have time to read sexual intent into every woman’s smile. Still, she added, “Many men do interpret a smile or gesture of warmth as a come-on. “I don’t think most women know how much men misinterpret a little bit of friendliness.”
So, what is a man not gifted in the art of mind reading to do when a strange woman smiles at him? Should he call a psychic hotline? Should he send a soda water with a twist of lime?
“Men who are sensitive [can] test their hypothesis that a woman who smiles at them is coming on to them by saying hello and starting a little conversation,” said Schwartz. “Others can be boorish about it.”
