Study On The Influences Of Gender And Attractiveness On Sexual Intent Perceptions

In daily life,it is necessary to infer others’ intentions from their behaviors,and especially perceive the sexual intentions of the opposite sex in the relationships.Sexual intentions or sexual intent refers to one’s subjective interest in pursuing some types of sexual activity and perceptions of sexual intentions or sexual intent perceptions refer to the assessment of one’s interest in pursuing sexual activity.Abbey(1982)first studied the gender differences in sexual intent perceptions and found two interesting results.One the one hand,male observers perceived more sexual information from the male and female actors than female observers did.On the other hand,male participants rated their female partners as more promiscuous and seductive than female participants rated their partners.Then,researchers found men’s overperception of women’s sexual intentions and women’s underperception of men’s sexual intentions after introducing the target’s self-reported sexual intentions.The phenomenon that men perceived more sexual intentions from women than women did and even than women’s self-reported sexual intentions got more attentions,because men’s sexual overperception can lead to sexual coercion,sexual aggression and sexual harassment.Oversexualization hypothesis,cue insensitivity hypothesis,confluence model,projection hypothesis,cognitive valence theory and error management theory provided sufficient evidence to explain gender differences.Many studies have found men’s overperception,which might be caused by culture,and lots of studies prone to this phenomenon were conducted in America.A few studies found that American females reported less sexual intentions than women in other counties,and one item(bought jewelry)in Date Behaviors Scale caused the greatest gender differences.After removing this item,the genderdifferences of Chile and France were not significant.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate whether these gender differences might exist under Chinese culture.In addition,some researchers also examined the gender differences in perceiving the sexual intentions of opposite sex.However,they got the inconsistent results.In recent years,it has been proposed that gender was not the significant predictor and other factors should be paid more attention to in perceiving the sexual intentions of opposite sex.Many researchers emphasized the importance of gender,but this researcher proposed a new idea.In this study,we also investigated the gender differences in perceiving the sexual intentions of opposite sex.First,Study 1 adopted the questionnaires to investigate whether men perceived more sexual intentions from male,female and opposite-sex targets than women did under Chinese culture.Then in study 2,we explored the formation mechanism of these gender differences.Study 1 found that gender differences were not significant when perceiving the sexual intentions of opposite sex.Individual’s other characteristics such as attractiveness might influence their perception of opposite-sex sexual intentions.Then in study 3,we investigated the influences of attractiveness on individual’s sexual intent perceptions of opposite sex.We found that only self-perceived attractiveness can predict participants’ perception of opposite-sex sexual intentions by adopting subjective and objective attractiveness.In order to explore the influence mechanism of self-perceived attractiveness on sexual intention perception of opposite sex,we proposed some possible mediation variables based on previous studies,such as self-esteem,respondents’ confidence in their ability to attract a romantic partner and sociosexuality.Following are the principal results:(1)The results of independent t test showed that under Chinese culture,male participants perceived more sexual intentions from male and female targets than women did.This gender differences were caused by sex drive.These results supported the projection hypothesis to a certain degree.(2)We found that female participants in Chinese and other countries still reported more sexual intentions than American females whether or not removing the inappropriate items.However,the ratings of American male participants were less different from men’s ratings in other countries.This result showed that the unique culture of America might increase the gender differences in perceiving women’s sexual intentions.(3)Gender can no longer to influence the participants’ sexual intent perception of opposite sex seriously.Study 3 and study 4 investigated the influence of attractiveness on participants’ sexual intent perception of opposite sex and the results demonstrated that only self-perceived attractiveness was the significant predictor.Most impacts of self-perceived attractiveness were achieved throughindividual’s confidence in their ability to attract a romantic partner and their sociosexuality.Overall,there were significant gender differences in perceiving the sexual intentions of male and female targets,and these gender differences were caused by sex drive.However,other factors rather than gender can influence individual’s perception of opposite-sex sexual intentions such as individual’s self-perceived attractiveness.At this time one’s confidence in their ability to attract romantic partners and sociosexuality can explain most influences.