A Dress is (Still) Not a Yes: How Even Simple Key Presses Reveal Sexually Aroused Men’s Overreliance on Global Cues in the Context of Sexual Flirting

In a pilot study using mouse-tracking, men’s interpretation and weighting of global sexual (e.g., clothing style) and specific affective (e.g., facial expression) cues when judging women’s flirting intentions depended on two factors: (1) whether the men were sexually aroused and (2) whether the women’s sexual and affective cues were congruent or incongruent. Both reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER) emerged as significant indicators of men’s overreliance on global cues (OGC) in the context of sexual flirting, as evidenced by their positive correlations with self-report trait measures of interpersonally problematic (e.g., disinhibited, exploitative) sexuality. In the present study, we sought to replicate these findings in a substantially larger sample, using a simplified key-press paradigm and focusing solely on RT and ER as dependent variables. In a preregistered online study with heterosexual men (N = 284), experimentally induced sexual arousal again increased the likelihood of OGC as a function of task difficulty, i.e., the (in)congruence between global sexual and specific affective cues displayed by a potential female flirting partner. While the main and interaction effects were replicated and a meaningful pattern of correlations emerged between the experimental measures and self-report measures of dispositional risk factors for sexually problematic behavior, a somewhat different moderation pattern by these individual differences was observed. Taken together, the simplified paradigm proved largely successful and appears promising for diagnostic applications in forensic and clinical contexts.