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.
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.