Are you coming on to me?

• Position: Sociology - Brief article

College-age males confuse friendly nonverbal cues with cues for sexual interest because men have a less discerning eye than women--but their female peers are not far behind, suggests research from Indiana University, Bloomington, and Yale University, New Haven, Conn. In the study, men who viewed images of friendly women misidentified 12% of the images as sexually interested. Women mistook 8.7% of friendly images for sexual interest. The real shocker, however, is the fact that both men and women were even more likely to do the opposite--when viewing images of sexually interested women, men mistakenly called 37.8% of the images "friendly." Women mistook 31.9% of the sexual-interest cues for friendliness.

Scientists long have known that young men are more likely than women to confuse friendly...