A dress is not a yes : towards an indirect mouse-tracking measure of men’s overreliance on global cues in the context of sexual flirting

Abstract

Assessing another person’s intention to flirt and, relatedly, their sexual interest is based on the interpretation and weighting of global (e.g., clothing style) and specific (e.g., facial expression) cues. Since cue incongruency increases the risk of erroneous judgments and thus can entail undesirable outcomes for both parties involved, detection of an individual propensity for overly relying on global (sexual) rather than specific (affective) cues is of social and clinical-forensic importance. Using a purpose-designed and pre-validated stimulus set, we developed a mouse-tracking task as an indirect behavioral measure for males’ overreliance on global cues (OGC) in the context of sexual flirting. In a convenience sample of heterosexual cisgender men (N = 79), experimentally induced sexual arousal was shown to increase the probability of OGC as a function of task difficulty (i.e., congruent or incongruent combinations of global and specific cues displayed by a potential female flirting partner). While error r