The relationship between men and women might very well be the most studied topic in history, but there is still lots of ground to cover.

Ever since he was a graduate student, UUPer Glenn Geher, chair of the psychology department at New Paltz, has been interested in issues tied to human mating, so the purpose of his latest study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology matched his interests.

“We wanted to better understand cross-sex mind-reading in the domain of mating, essentially asking ‘How well do women understand the mating thoughts of men?’ and vice versa,” Geher explains.

Geher’s research team surveyed 481 young men and women who examined sets of personal ads. Half of the ads were written by members of the opposite sex. In each case, participants rated which ad (in sets of three) was most attractive to them for either short or long-term relationships. Participants then rated the ads written by members of their own sex, in this case, making cross-sex mind-reading judgments by trying to guess which ads were rated as most attractive by the opposite sex.”

Geher’s study concluded that one gender doesn’t triumph over the other when it comes to cross-sex mind-reading.

“My research found that women are better at knowing the short-term interests of men, while men excel at knowing the long-term interests of women,” he said. “Thus, each sex seems to have abilities that are optimized toward the dominant strategy of the opposite sex.”

The study’s conclusion that men are better at identifying the long-term interests of women than the reverse was somewhat surprising to Geher.

“A long history of research on social intelligence tells us that females nearly always outperform males on measures of social intelligence. Here we find an important exception to this trend,” he said.

Geher said his research pokes holes in the oft-heard complaint from women: “All men are pigs.” He found that a large majority of the men preferred the personal ad that said, “I’ll make your favorite sandwich in the middle of the night” over one that was very sexual in nature. A large majority of women believed men would have chosen the sexually tinged ad.

“Females consistently overestimated the degree to which men were interested in the highly sexual stimuli,” Geher concluded.

Geher credits UUP for enabling him to conduct such research. Last year, he was eager to attend the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference, one of the major conferences in his area of expertise.

“I really wanted to attend, largely so I could talk about this research with folks in the field,” he recalled. Problem was, the conference was in Kyoto, Japan, presenting him with a major travel expense he could ill afford. But UUP made his wish come true.

“A professional development award from UUP made this all possible, and it was an unforgettable trip,” Geher said.

— Donald Feldstein