The Myth of Female Intuition

Why am I not surprised by this story?

The popular assumption that women's powers of intuition exceed those of men has been overturned by a new study.

Psychologists who tested the abilities of more than 15,000 people to identify the sincerity or otherwise of different smiles have concluded that female intuition is a myth.

Shown a series of pairs of images of individuals displaying real and fake smiles, men marginally outperformed women. When it came to judging genuine and false expressions of happiness in the opposite sex, male participants did significantly better than females.

[...]

Participants were shown 10 pairs of photographs of smiling faces, some of which were partially masked. One of each pair of smiles was genuine and the other was fake.

Before studying the faces, participants were asked to rate their intuitive abilities. More women defined themselves as highly intuitive - 77 per cent compared with just 58 per cent of men. However, their claims were not backed up in the experiment this month at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Men were able to pick out 72 per cent of genuine smiles, while women detected 71 per cent. When evaluating sincerity in the faces of the opposite sex, men were right in 76 per cent of cases compared with 67 per cent for women.

I suspect that there's no real difference between the sexes in how well they're able to pick up on insincerity, and what people like to call "female intuition" is just a sign that women are less inclined to disregard the feelings of others, rather than that men are oblivious. To put it bluntly, men don't mind being bastards and being regarded as such, especially by other men.

Comments

[The swedish vicarage]

I have always known myself as a bastard. My wife doesn't know.

[Sotong]

Who decides which smiles are genuine and which are fake? The people who posed for the photographs (who might lie), or the researchers (who, AFAIK, have no objective way of knowing)? I can see it now:
"We need some snapshots for this study we're doing. Could you give us a nice genuine smile please? Thanks. And now, we need a fake smile. Cheeeese..."
"Hang on a sec, I think I wasn't being quite genuine enough there..."

Not knowing how the genuineness or otherwise of each smile was determined, I reckon the study really just measures how likely the guineapigs are to agree with whoever made that determination, rather than their objective ability to determine the genuineness of a smile.

If so, that would mean the study neither proves nor disproves the claim that women are more intuitive. Moreover, this being an MSM newspaper article, the author doesn't link back to where I might perhaps learn about the assumptions used in the study and draw my own conclusions regarding its merit. Sigh. I can find Richard Wiseman on Google, but no details of his study. Sigh again.

[hex]

It would interest me to know why "some of [the faces in the photographs] were partially masked". How can you tell if a smile is genuine if you can't see the eyes?

[Abiola Lapite]

There *are* other "tells" than just the eye muscles. Look at the corners of the lips, for instance; the risorius muscle will be contracted if a smile is genuine. For more, see the following:

http://members.aol.com/nonverbal2/zygosmi.htm#ZYGOMATIC%20SMILE

[kwasi]

Maybe next someone will deal with the myth that women are more mature than men

[Todd Fletcher]

Isn't it obvious why women performed more poorly? Evolution has seen to it: if women could distinguish betweeen fake and real smiles in men, they'd never get laid ;-)

[neil]

Being able to judge sincerity would be equally advantageous to both sexes so it’s unlikely to differ and as Abiola points out it’s what one does with that information that makes a difference. (How much of that is in itself genetically influenced?) But there is still the possibility that women may be better at reading facial expressions overall.

[john]

My experience is that women are more observant than men about people they know. Most men are focused on something else, achieving, competing, thinking, etc. Therefore, unless you force them to consider whether someone is faking or not, they will have a greater tendency than women to simply overlook it.

Analytically, I intuitively concur with the study. However, they have eliminated what I see to be a crucial real-life element: the fact that even though men might be just as good or better than woman at diagnosing this, they are much more likely to overlook the entire issue in the first place.

This would be challenging to test but better reflective of the genuine condition

[Jim]

"My experience is that women are more observant than men about people they know."

In hierarchical settings judging the boss' mood is a matter of great importance. It is also important in sales and similar negotiations. Traditionally these are male-sphere activities, so a man is going ton have as much need as an woman for these skills.

Most of the mental adaptations where men differ from women have to do with hunting adaptations, such as judging trajectories. Men developed those but still retained the earlier adaptations, such as judging color, because we still had to be able to judge ripeness. The same holds for judging sincerity and moods.