I’m confused by the study you cited. It seems to say that 14 females self-reported as flirting and that “18% (n = 2)” of their partners correctly believed they were flirting, but 2⁄14 = 14% and 3⁄14 = 21%. To get 18% of 14 would mean about 2.5 were right. Maybe someone said “I don’t know” and that counted that as half-correct? If so, that wasn’t mentioned in the procedure section.
It also says that 11 males self-reported as flirting, and lists accuracy as “36% (n = 5)”, but 5⁄11 would be 45%; an accuracy of 36% corresponds to 4⁄11.
I don’t think I trust this paper’s numbers.
If we were to take the numbers at face value, though, the paper is effectively saying that female flirting is invisible. 18% correctly believed the girls were flirting when they were, but 17% believed they were flirting even when they weren’t, and with only 14 girls flirting, 1% is a rounding error. So this is saying that actual female flirting has zero effect on whether her partner perceives her as flirting.
Ignoring methodology issues for a moment, it is impossible to tell if women have inability to flirt or men have an inability to tell if a woman is flirting. To disentangle this, I propose an experiment with men/men and women/women pairings. In a perfect world, you would also have every combination of (binary) gender and sexual orientation.
The paper actually includes a second experiment where they had observers watch a video recording of a conversation and say whether they thought the person on the video was flirting. Results in table 4, page 15; copied below, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to format them as a table in a LessWrong comment:
Observer | Target | Flirting conditions | Accuracy (n) Female Female Flirting 51% (187) Female Female Non-flirting 67% (368) Female Male Flirting 22% (170) Female Male Non-flirting 64% (385) Male Female Flirting 43% (76) Male Female Non-flirting 68% (149) Male Male Flirting 33% (64) Male Male Non-flirting 62% (158)
Among third-party observers, females observing females had the highest accuracy, though their perception of flirting is still only 18 percentage points higher when flirting occurs than when it doesn’t.
Third-party observers in all categories had a larger bias towards perceiving flirting than the people who were actually in the conversation. Though this experimental setup also had a larger percentage of people actually flirting, so this bias was actually reasonably accurate to the data they were shown.
Though, again, this study looks shoddy and should be taken with a lot of salt.
I was also confused by that, and resolved it by adding some more salt on my already-salt-heavy view of the paper. I do not trust that these authors can do basic arithmetic, nor that they had a large enough sample for the numbers to be particularly meaningful anyway, but I do believe the large qualitative findings.
So this is saying that actual female flirting has zero effect on whether her partner perceives her as flirting.
Yup, I actually had a few sentences talking about that (I do find it very plausible, in the 10-minute-conversation setup used). I cut those sentences because I do not trust the numbers enough to update on something that precise.
I’m confused by the study you cited. It seems to say that 14 females self-reported as flirting and that “18% (n = 2)” of their partners correctly believed they were flirting, but 2⁄14 = 14% and 3⁄14 = 21%. To get 18% of 14 would mean about 2.5 were right. Maybe someone said “I don’t know” and that counted that as half-correct? If so, that wasn’t mentioned in the procedure section.
It also says that 11 males self-reported as flirting, and lists accuracy as “36% (n = 5)”, but 5⁄11 would be 45%; an accuracy of 36% corresponds to 4⁄11.
I don’t think I trust this paper’s numbers.
If we were to take the numbers at face value, though, the paper is effectively saying that female flirting is invisible. 18% correctly believed the girls were flirting when they were, but 17% believed they were flirting even when they weren’t, and with only 14 girls flirting, 1% is a rounding error. So this is saying that actual female flirting has zero effect on whether her partner perceives her as flirting.
Ignoring methodology issues for a moment, it is impossible to tell if women have inability to flirt or men have an inability to tell if a woman is flirting. To disentangle this, I propose an experiment with men/men and women/women pairings. In a perfect world, you would also have every combination of (binary) gender and sexual orientation.
The paper actually includes a second experiment where they had observers watch a video recording of a conversation and say whether they thought the person on the video was flirting. Results in table 4, page 15; copied below, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to format them as a table in a LessWrong comment:
Observer | Target | Flirting conditions | Accuracy (n)
Female Female Flirting 51% (187)
Female Female Non-flirting 67% (368)
Female Male Flirting 22% (170)
Female Male Non-flirting 64% (385)
Male Female Flirting 43% (76)
Male Female Non-flirting 68% (149)
Male Male Flirting 33% (64)
Male Male Non-flirting 62% (158)
Among third-party observers, females observing females had the highest accuracy, though their perception of flirting is still only 18 percentage points higher when flirting occurs than when it doesn’t.
Third-party observers in all categories had a larger bias towards perceiving flirting than the people who were actually in the conversation. Though this experimental setup also had a larger percentage of people actually flirting, so this bias was actually reasonably accurate to the data they were shown.
Though, again, this study looks shoddy and should be taken with a lot of salt.
I was also confused by that, and resolved it by adding some more salt on my already-salt-heavy view of the paper. I do not trust that these authors can do basic arithmetic, nor that they had a large enough sample for the numbers to be particularly meaningful anyway, but I do believe the large qualitative findings.
Yup, I actually had a few sentences talking about that (I do find it very plausible, in the 10-minute-conversation setup used). I cut those sentences because I do not trust the numbers enough to update on something that precise.