Perceived association between diagnostic and non-diagnostic cues of women’s sexual interest: General Recognition Theory predictors of risk for sexual coercion

Young men’s errors in sexual perception have been linked to sexual coercion. The current investigation sought to explicate the perceptual and decisional sources of these social perception errors, as well as their link to risk for sexual violence. General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby, F. G., & Townsend, J. T. (1986). Varieties of perceptual independence. Psychological Review, 93, 154-179]) was used to estimate participants’ ability to discriminate between affective cues and clothing style cues and to measure illusory correlations between men’s perception of women’s clothing style and sexual interest. High-risk men were less sensitive to the distinction between women’s friendly and sexual interest cues relative to other men. In addition, they were more likely to perceive an illusory correlation between women’s diagnostic sexual interest cues (e.g., facial affect) and non-diagnostic cues (e.g., provocative clothing), which increases the probability that high-risk men will misperceive friendly women as intending to communicate sexual interest. The results provide information about the degree of risk conferred by individual differences in perceptual processing of women’s interest cues, and also illustrate how translational scientists might adapt GRT to examine research questions about individual differences in social perception.