Occcasionally when PervScan posts something not explicitly perverse, a commenter will flip out about the tangent. So here is a warning for all of you die-hard pervs who only want to read about people fucking animals and cadavers. What follows is not perverse. It is, however, a fascinating look at, um, mating behavior.

Science Daily recently posted an article titled “Interested or Deceptively Flirting?” It describes an experiment recently published in Psychological Science. The researchers showed video clips of speed-dating couples to college students and asked them to make predictions about the couple’s level of mutual interest. The goal was to see how well observers could interpret romantic interest and to field-test a few relevant hypotheses, such as that women would be better judges of romantic interest than men. Here is an excerpt of the news item:

For the study, 28 women and 26 men of college age watched video clips of couples interacting on speed dates. Speed dating is a popular commercial method for singles to meet a large number of individuals in one evening of successive brief one-on-one conversations. Each participant observed 24 videos, all with different men and women, and after each rated whether the man seemed interested in the woman and the woman in the man. The speed dating sessions were all conducted in Germany while the observer ratings were all made by students in Indiana. Despite the language difference, observers were still able to judge men’s romantic interest accurately using body language, tone of voice, eye contact, how often each dater spoke and other non-verbal cues… Observers did not have to see much of this non-verbal behavior. They were just as good at predicting the speed-dating couple’s interest if they saw only 10 seconds of the date as they were if they saw 30 seconds. The researchers say this showed that observers, even with limited information, could make quick, accurate inferences using “thin slices” of behavior. There was, however, great variability in how well observers could predict the interest of any particular speed-dater, ranging from 90 percent accuracy down to 10 percent. In five of the videos, 80 percent of the observers thought the women shown were interested when in fact they were not — they were acting friendly even though they had no interest in the men. Evolutionary theory, said Place, predicts a certain level of coyness or even deceptiveness in women because if a relationship is abandoned they may face greater costs, including pregnancy and child rearing. When choosing a mate, it is in a woman’s best interest to get men to open up and talk honestly to give her a better idea of whether they would be good long-term partners.

The best part about the study is that you can participate too. There is an online version of the experiment. You answer some questions about yourself and how attractive you find some faces in sample images, then you watch video excerpts of speed-dating couples. The whole thing is safe for work and takes about 15 minutes to complete. Afterward, the experiment software tells you how successful you were at predicting couples’ romantic interest. PervScan was 50/50 on both males and females — an average score, one presumes. Go take the test if you have the time and then report back in the comments.

The authors of the study do a fine job drawing out the implications for sexual behavior, so PervScan will only note that it would be fascinating to apply the same techniques to perversion. For example, college students could watch video of the same couples and predict which men and women would be most likely to beg the other for anal sex. Does a man who looks creepy really harbor creepy desires? Is a woman who looks like she’s “begging for it” really begging for it? Or to the contrary, does a sweet or charismatic facade conceal the darkest impulses?

Of course, you could imagine even more outrageous variations on this experiment. You could show videos of bestialists and farm animals or pedophiles and children… How accurate would observers be at predicting whether a cadaver is romantically interested in an ardent necrophile?

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