HARD TO READ WOMEM MIND

Experts agree, it’s hard to read a woman’s mind

Attached Image: women_minda.jpg
A new research now backs what men have said from time immemorial, women are difficult to read, and their ways mysterious.
Researchers at Indiana University showed video clips from 24 different speed dates and asked male and female participants two simple questions: “Do you think the man was interested in this woman?” and “Do you think the woman was interested in this man?” Their answers were then compared with the responses of the speed daters themselves, reports Live Science.
The results, published in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, show that both men and women are able to gauge a man’s interest in a woman, but are equally baffled when it comes to figuring out if a woman is interested in a man.
In fact, a flip of a coin would be almost as accurate in predicting a woman’s romantic interest on a date.
Skyler Place, who headed the study, says that the biological drive behind dating — finding an optimal mate for gene promotion — gives women reason to be elusive.
“Being coy forces the men to spend more time interacting with the woman, because they are unsure if they have successfully courted her,” Place said. “Therefore, the woman has more time to gather information about her date.”
Ultimately, women have more at stake while dating because they face higher “sunk costs” — a woman can carry the child of only one man at a time, while a man can impregnate many women. Video clips taken from the middle and end of dates provided the most accurate assessments, Place said, suggesting that the daters’ true feelings became more evident as they collected information throughout their encounter.
The speed dates were conducted in Germany as part of Humboldt University’s Berlin Speed Dating Study. None of the Indiana University study participants understood German, and were using only visual cues and tone of voice to determine daters’ interest.
“From an evolutionary perspective, there is nothing wrong with a woman being ‘open’ and ‘honest’ about who she is — it is simply in her best interest not to present herself as actually interested immediately,” Place said.
There was, however, great variability in how well observers could predict the interest of any particular speed-dater, ranging from 90% accuracy down to 10%. In five of the videos, 80% 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. AGENCIES