Pascal’s Wager explains why men are clueless romantically? Error management theory

It’s a running joke in sitcoms that men over estimate women’s romantic interest in them. This was parodied in Seinfeld when George discusses the various “signals” women use to communicate that men like Jerry don’t pick up on.

Is there a reason men are systematically clueless romantically? Long-time reader Ben sent me an interesting article with a possible explanation. And coincidentally, the explanation is related to Pascal’s Wager:

Why do we believe in God (Part I)

Why do we believe in God (Part II)

I suggest you check out the articles. This is the gist of the argument:

–Experimentally, a lot of men overstate how interested women are in them. The reason? For men, it is a safer to live as though women are interested in sex. This minimizes the error of a missed sex opportunity.

–Historically, many societies have had a belief in supernatural forces like a God. The reason? In Pascal’s wager, it is a safer bet to live as though God existed. This minimizes the error of missing out on heaven.

The two conclusions are said to be implications of Error Management Theory. The articles describes Error Management Theory as a concept where we make decisions not to minimize the number of errors but rather the cost of errors. For instance, it is safer to build an oversensitive smoke detector than to build one that is under sensitive and might miss an actual fire.

I find this all very interesting. The only thing I would add is that beliefs are usually not all-or-nothing, but rather probability distributions. Hence our beliefs would tend to be skewed toward safer bets–that is, we are risk averse.



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  • el chief

    You are falling for the flaw of averages. Most men are terrible at reading women, but some are excellent. Men are not systematically clueless, but on average, they are.

    The reason that most men are clueless is that they are systematically lied to by women and beta men.

    Read roissy.wordpress.com and you will understand.

  • Eyal

    This reminds me of an episode of House that I saw. The patient was turning to stone (her body was ossifying). The doctors came up with a dozen reasons why it could be happening but quickly narrowed it down to one: The only one that isn’t incurable/fatal.

    Being wrong had no drawback (she would have died anyway) but being right would have saved her life. Any other reason for her ailment would have meant her death.

    The scene was rather witty. If you can find it, it’s worth watching for the quick, logical reasoning.

  • Scott

    I think this concept delves into our basic biology.

    Pattern recognition systems can suffer from two types of basic errors:

    Type I (false positive) – This is when an anticipated condition is detected when it isn’t actually there.

    Type II (false negative) – This is when an anticipated condition is not detected but it is actually there.

    It is in the nature of pattern recognition systems that calibrating them to reduce one type of error necessarily makes them more prome to the other.

    My experience with this concept is in the realm of computer security, so we are concerned with reducing Type II errors. The “anticipated condition” in this case are security risks and vulnerabilities. We are more than happy to have false positives (risk/vulnerability detected when none actually exists) so long as we minimize the actual risks/vulnerabilities that we fail to detect.

    The same, I belive, applies to living organisms. Our brains are biological pattern recognition machines. The “anticipated conditions” for us are: sexual opportunities, food sources, environmental threats, threats from predators, etc. (Anything that has a significant change of affecting our ability to survive and breed).

    It is in our best interest to see opportunties and threats that aren’t there (where the only loss is the energy expended to pursue/avoid it) as opposed to *not* seeing opportunties and threats that are there (Where the loss is starvation/being eaten).

    Since this is part of the foundation of our psychology, it makes sense that this type of thinking would appear in other areas as well. (Such as evaluating the romantic interest of potential partners).

    This behavior can also be generalized as the phenomenon of pareidolia (seeing patterns in randomness) which appears in all sorts of behaviors and beliefs (most notably those of the superstitious variety).

  • Kurt

    According to the following study, young men tend to mistake “friend” signals as sexual signals, but are even more likely to mistake sexual signals as “friend” signals! So men are much more likely to read signals overly pessimistically.

    And women aren’t all that much better at reading signals.

    http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/7883.html

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