I thought we were just friends! Emergence of Sexual Misperception Biases in Adolescence
– by Marius Stavang
Imagine you’re on a movie date with someone. Everything seems to be going great. The conversation flows easily, you laugh together, you exchange smiles—there’s chemistry. After the movie, you walk them home. On their doorstep, you exchange a lingering look and a shared laugh about how good—or bad—the movie was. The moment feels perfect. There are sparks. Nervous, but summoning what courage you can, you close your eyes, purse your lips, and lean in for a kiss.
Suddenly you’re interrupted with a loud protest, “I thought we were just friends!” Your heart sinks immediately, you feel devastated, crushed, and also—deeply ashamed. You realize you’ve misinterpreted the relationship between the two of you. You mistook their friendliness for romantic interest. Meanwhile, your friend—confused and saddened by what’s happening—feels their own sting of guilt and embarrassment. How could they not have seen that your invitation might have meant something more?
In evolutionary psychology, these two errors of inference are referred to as sexual overperception and sexual underperception. Sexual overperception involves mistaking someone’s friendliness for romantic interest, whereas sexual underperception involves mistaking romantic interest for mere friendliness.
If people were always completely transparent about their romantic interest—“Hey, I fancy you as a long-term romantic partner. Want to go see a movie together?”—errors in sexual perception wouldn’t occur. But for some reason humans are highly anxious and cautious about revealing their non-platonic interest. Instead, we engage in a subtle dance, gradually signaling that we want “something more,” while trying to infer whether the other person is spending time with us for the same reason. And because humans are imperfect mind readers, errors in sexual inference are inevitable.
It also turns out that men and women are not equally likely to sexually over- or underperceive one another. A large body of research shows that men are more likely to overperceive women’s interest than to underperceive it, whereas women are more likely to underperceive men’s interest than to overperceive it. The magnitude and consistency of these sex differences have led researchers to label them the male sexual overperception bias and the female sexual underperception bias.
Put simply, men tend to overestimate how keen women are on them, while women tend to underestimate how keen men are on them. These sexual misperception biases have been identified consistently in adults across a wide range of methods. But an important question remains: When do these biases emerge in development? At what age do males begin to overperceive female’s interest—19, 17, or perhaps as early as 14? And when do females begin to underperceive male’s interest?
We wanted to find out. Studying topics related to sex among those under 18, however, is—for good reason—highly sensitive and requires great caution. For cultural, practical, and ethical reasons, it is not feasible to ask very young individuals directly about their socio-sexual inference making.
This means there is a lower age limit for what can reasonably be studied. For us, that limit was 16. Using a Norwegian high-school sample of adolescents aged 16 to 19 (N = 1 290), we asked participants to report how often, over the past 12 months, their friendliness had been mistaken for sexual interest—and how often their sexual interest had been mistaken for friendliness.
The results showed that from ages 16 to 19, girls were increasingly—and seemingly linearly—more likely to be overperceived. From age 17 onward, they reported that males exhibited an overperception bias. Boys, on the other hand, were consistently underperceived from age 16, and the frequency of these reports did not change with age. Taken together, these findings suggest that male’s sexual overperception bias strengthens throughout mid-to-late adolescence and may first emerge around age 17. In contrast, female’s sexual underperception bias appears to be activated and relatively stable already by age 16.
In sum, the findings suggest that from age 16 onward, males and females are already heavily engaged in inferring one another’s romantic interest. Like adults, they are frequently exposed both to misinterpreting others and to being misinterpreted themselves—boys more often ending up disappointed and ashamed for overestimating others’ interest, and girls more often confused, embarrassed, and even guilty for feeling they should have noticed that others wanted something more.
Thus, unless someone makes it trendy to disclose romantic interest upfront, the “likes me, likes me not” guessing game will forever remain a classic.
