3 ms·

Women can predict a man's attitude toward casual sex based on face

2 points by starkd 5y ago

retrac 5y ago
> For the men, it was a different story. While most of them thought they would be able to tell, they actually did no better than if had they chosen randomly. Are women not signalling or are men not picking it up? I'd love to see this replicated with homosexual men.
starkd 5y ago
This is not a new phenomenon. It's been known that birth control pill alters a woman's preference. While ovulating, there's a distinct preference for more more masculine type men. The pill seems to alter the preference towards less masculine men. What's not mentioned is just what women preferred in this instance - that is, which did they find more attractive. It was measuring attitudes during the pandemic and hints that they found them less attractive and therefore less interested in casual sex, which would confirm the previous studies.
version_five 5y ago
I'm skeptical, not from any domain knowledge but from knowledge about spurious results like this in machine learning models. E.g. ML models have been able to predict if someone is gay, or a criminal, etc, from an image, to some level of accuracy. But what they are doing is stereotyping, they are not actually applying some kind of causal logic. It could be equally simple here: seeing stereotype of a high testosterone looking guy, the women's bias more often than not could lead her to think he's up for sex. It doesnt have to be some innate sense, it could just be a simple stereotype. I couldn't read the actual paper, but I wonder what the accuracy was. I bet there are lots of misses. Anyway, maybe the paper covers all this, but one conclusion could be that you can be correct more often than not if you stereotype. Doesn't make it a fair basis for decision, but it's predictive power is better than random.
gus_massa 5y ago
For a second time in my life: There is more info in the article in the Dailymail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9783195/Men-longer-features-larger-eyes-perceived-promiscuous-study-finds.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9783195/Men-... Anyway, I still want to see the table of data that support "significantly above chance".

2 points by starkd 5y ago

> For the men, it was a different story. While most of them thought they would be able to tell, they actually did no better than if had they chosen randomly. Are women not signalling or are men not picking it up? I'd love to see this replicated with homosexual men.

starkd 5y ago

This is not a new phenomenon. It's been known that birth control pill alters a woman's preference. While ovulating, there's a distinct preference for more more masculine type men. The pill seems to alter the preference towards less masculine men. What's not mentioned is just what women preferred in this instance - that is, which did they find more attractive. It was measuring attitudes during the pandemic and hints that they found them less attractive and therefore less interested in casual sex, which would confirm the previous studies.

version_five 5y ago

I'm skeptical, not from any domain knowledge but from knowledge about spurious results like this in machine learning models. E.g. ML models have been able to predict if someone is gay, or a criminal, etc, from an image, to some level of accuracy. But what they are doing is stereotyping, they are not actually applying some kind of causal logic. It could be equally simple here: seeing stereotype of a high testosterone looking guy, the women's bias more often than not could lead her to think he's up for sex. It doesnt have to be some innate sense, it could just be a simple stereotype. I couldn't read the actual paper, but I wonder what the accuracy was. I bet there are lots of misses. Anyway, maybe the paper covers all this, but one conclusion could be that you can be correct more often than not if you stereotype. Doesn't make it a fair basis for decision, but it's predictive power is better than random.

gus_massa 5y ago

For a second time in my life: There is more info in the article in the Dailymail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9783195/Men-longer-features-larger-eyes-perceived-promiscuous-study-finds.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9783195/Men-... Anyway, I still want to see the table of data that support "significantly above chance".