Do You Think I'm Sexy?

Men consistently overrate their desirability to women, who in turn overestimate their own attractiveness, but only with regard to highly desirable men. Men aren't necessarily more arrogant, they're just wired to avoid missing mating opportunities, so they more readily exhibit this "overperception bias." To demonstrate this principle of evolutionary psychology, Glenn Scheyd, M.S., a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, asked students to rate the desirability of opposite-sex individuals and to estimate how attractive they thought that individual would find them. Women rated themselves accurately, except when it came to men they found attractive, in which case the women overestimated their own desirability. As predicted, men overrated themselves regardless of the woman's appearance. Scheyd presented his findings at the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.