I want her to want me: Sexual misperception as a function of heterosexual men's romantic attachment style

Heterosexual men consistently overperceive women's sexual interest. Past studies have related overperception to individual and situational factors such as alcohol intoxication, but nobody has yet investigated personality factors that may contribute to sexual misperception. The present research takes a first step in that direction by examining the relation between attachment style and sexual misperception. Two studies revealed that men's romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance predicted the extent to which men estimated the sexual interest of a hypothetical woman in a nightclub scenario. Mediation analyses suggest that this is due to both motivated social perception and cognitive bias. Specifically, men's attachment anxiety predicts increased desire for intimacy, which predicts their hope that a woman will be sexually interested; consequently, men imagine themselves as more flirtatious in the scenario, which biases them toward imagining the woman as more flirtatious, too. A similar process occurred for attachment avoidance, but in the opposite direction.