Error Management Theory - Sexual Underperception

Sexual Underperception

Females

Women also fall victim to misconceptions during male-female interactions. Haselton and Buss (2000) advocate that these errors primarily stem from women’s perceived desire for a committed relationship by a male counterpart. Women have evolved strategies to protect themselves from deception.One of these evolved strategies is to commit the skeptical commitment bias.The Skeptical commitment bias is an error management bias in which the gender fails to infer a psychological state that is there. Error management theory proposes that in this bias, women early in the courtship underestimate the amount of relational devotion and commitment a potential mate is willing to give. For example, if a male gave a female flowers during courtship the recipient tends to underestimate the extent to which the flowers signal commitment in comparison to “Objective” outside observers. This bias functions to decrease the costs of being sexually deceived by men who fake commitment in order to attain casual sex. In a scenario-based study, Haselton and Buss supported their postulate that women should have a bias directed at type II rather than type I errors.

Contrary to the sexual overperception bias, sexual underperception is brought on by the occurrence of a false negative . Underperception is committed more often by women than men. The reasoning for this may be linked to reproductive costs.

Evolutionarily speaking, sexual overperception is more costly than underperception. As stated by Haselton and Buss, in the past, women who over-perceived the commitment of a male, were more likely to end up with an unintended pregnancy, lack of a partner to raise a child with, and her own reputation at risk. Whereas committing a type I error might lead to complications in the female’s life and the added responsibility of rearing a child on her own, a type II error might serve to arouse further displays of sexual attraction to help indicate intent. Therefore, a type I error being committed by a woman produces greater costs than a type II error. In men, the result of a type II error produces a greater reproductive cost than does a type I error.