Marius Stavang

So allow me to explain the context and background by illustrating a situation a lot of people might have found themselves in at some point in their life or for many people many times in their life.

Say you're interacting with someone from the opposite sex.

Let's restrict the pronoun to heterosexual individuals, to men and women.

If a guy is interacting with a girl he knows, and say he has feelings for her, he is romantically interested in her.

he kind of faces this dilemma that he doesn't really know why is she hanging out with him, right?

Maybe she's hanging out with him because she shares those romantic feelings for him.

But in principle, he doesn't know that because people are typically very opaque about the romantic interest in someone.

People are like...

typically keep those cards very close to their chest and are reluctant to reveal the romantic interest to someone.

So you sort of engage in this guessing game, trying to figure out, okay, is she interested in me or is she just hanging out with me because she wants to be friends?

And it turns out that when men try to find that out,

they usually, or very often at least, mistake her friendliness for being romantically interested.

So, to put it simply, she's hanging out with him because she thinks he's a great friend and he's hanging out with her because he's really into her and he thinks she's into him and she thinks he just wants to be friends.

She has no idea he's into her.

And the sexual misperception that comes in when he misperceives her friendliness as her being romantically interested in him.

And a lot of research has shown that this tendency to misperceive women's friendliness as romantic interest, that's very robust in adult men.

And we wanted to find out when does this occur, like men's tendency to sort of misperceive women's femininity as a sexual interest.

And we found out it is already there by around age 16, and it sort of grows in strength throughout adolescence.

Men from age 60 to 19, they more strongly tend to start to believe that

a girl is into him more than just for the sake of being friends.