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Over the past several months, I haven’t been able to escape Chappell Roan. The 26-year-old singer shot to fame this spring after finding viral success with infectious synth-pop songs celebrating unbridled sexual freedom. The most popular tracks of her recent album, with titles like “HOT TO GO!” and “Red Wine Supernova,” are repeat plays at seemingly every house party and dive bar I’ve been to this year.

Roan has become the latest balladeer of idealized, unburdened young adulthood, forming the soundtrack to countless twentysomething nights punctuated by sticky floors, fake eyelashes, and the anonymous intimacy of dancing with strangers. At a friend’s recent karaoke birthday party—one of those nights where I found myself in a dark, palpitating, multi-screened room—guests sang no fewer than three different songs from her album.

One of those songs—“Casual”—is set apart from the rest of Roan’s hits. Despite going viral for joyful, raunchy anthems hailing the pleasures of casual sex, Roan has released a near-perfect musical distillation of the heartbreak that often follows so-called “casual” relationships. The song’s resonance with so many young people, I think, is particularly telling.

“It’s hard being casual/ When my favorite bra lives in your dresser/ It’s hard being casual/ When I’m on the phone talking down your sister,” Roan sings during the song’s haunting bridge. “And I try to be the chill girl that/ Holds her tongue and gives you space/ I try to be the chill girl but/ Honestly, I’m not.”

Roan is describing a textbook “situationship,” an increasingly popular term used to describe any unlabeled, undefined romantic relationship. While some use the term neutrally, I most often hear it used to describe something much more inherently negative—a distinct mismatch in which one member of a casual entanglement is content with the arrangement while the other quietly yearns for a committed, labeled relationship. One salient definition offered by an Urban Dictionary user describes situationships as “emotional trauma in a gift box.”

Romantic dissatisfaction and ambivalence are all over the most popular music of the past year. “We had sex, I met your best friends/ Then a bird flies by and you forget,” Sabrina Carpenter sings in “The Sharpest Tool,” adding, “If that was casual, then I’m an idiot.” Brat, Charli XCX’s wildly successful album, is largely devoted to romanticizing the emotionally unavailable, hyperattractive, unanchored young woman. However, things take a turn in the album’s penultimate track, “I Think About It All the Time,” in which the narrator reveals her yearning for romantic stability and motherhood––as well as her conflict over whether to make choices that could bring her incredible joy, but also restrict her freedom. “And they’re exactly the same, but they’re different now,” she sings about two friends who recently became parents. “And I’m so scared I’m missin’ out on something/ So, we had a conversation on the way home/ Should I stop my birth control?”

In a situationship, there’s frequently not just the imbalance of one partner who cares more than the other, but also an inner turmoil in each person—the dueling desires to embrace domestic security and the urge to be unburdened and unrestrained by romantic commitments. While it’s easy to dismiss situationships’ rising popularity as just another permutation of age-old dating woes, there’s an important hitch. Unlike previous cohorts of young people, Generation Z is afflicted with endemic risk aversion—a personality feature that makes many current twentysomethings uniquely commitment-phobic.

In fact, Gen Z might just be the most risk-averse generation on record. Fewer Gen Zers got a driver’s license, drank alcohol, or had sex as teenagers than their parents did. The same young adults now report skyrocketing rates of anxiety and other mental illnesses, with some estimates finding that as many as 1 in 5 18-to-24-year-olds have been diagnosed with depression. Timidity—not to mention self-conscious neuroticism—is increasingly the norm.

But how did Gen Z become so risk-averse? The most popular answers are a combination of too much time on social media exacerbated by pandemic isolation and a lack of childhood independence. While earlier cohorts spent their adolescence hanging out with friends away from adult supervision, Gen Z childhoods were defined by increasing isolation, screentime, and parental hovering.

An ongoing study from Montclair State University argues that some of this risk aversion is due to the current political climate—or perhaps young people’s perception of it. “Gen Z’s mental health has deteriorated due to a worldview that the society and environment around them are crumbling,” writes justice studies professor Gabriel Rubin. “Rights are being taken away, the Earth is burning, maniacs could kill you with a gun, and viruses could shut down society again.”

This generational cautiousness has unsurprisingly affected how young people approach sex and dating. If you never learned how to take social risks as a teenager, starting in adulthood will be that much harder. If the world seems like it’s teetering on the edge of disaster, it’s hard to focus on anything else. It’s also hard to place much confidence in official relationships. If everything else is “deteriorating,” why commit if it could all be taken away?

According to market researcher YouGov, 50 percent of Americans aged 18–34 say they’ve been in a situationship. Over the same period of time, a report from the dating app Hinge found that 56 percent of Gen Z Hinge users said that fear of rejection caused them to stop pursuing a relationship, and 57 percent admitted that they’d held back on confessing their feelings for fear it would be a “turn-off.” This anxiety extends off-app, too. A recent survey found that almost half of young men have never approached a woman in public before, with most reporting “fear of rejection” as their reason for holding back. These trends foster a pervasive culture of romantic risk aversion—one that encourages young people to put on a self-protective facade of detachment and apathy, of which situationships are a key part.

However, the situationship is not resulting in the outcomes young people say they want. Gen Zers, like other adults, are generally looking for committed partnerships, and most hope to get married someday. According to one Pew survey, only 15 percent of single daters under 40 were looking just for casual dates, and nearly 7 in 10 unmarried young adults say they want to get married someday. Another 2023 survey from wedding website the Knot found that only 8 percent of Gen Z respondents agreed that marriage was “outdated.”

However, despite these wishes, few are actively pursuing them—at least not at the same rates as their parents and grandparents. Researcher Lyman Stone estimates that among current 23-year-olds, only around 60 percent of women and 50 percent of men will have married by 35, down from around 80 percent in 1994.

At first glance, it seems strange that situationships would be treated as the less risky alternative to traditional dating. While traditional relationships come with a ready-made set of expectations and boundaries, a hallmark feature of a situationship is the sense of being unmoored. Drifting into a quasi-relationship doesn’t just mean straddling the line between a committed partnership and a fully transactional friend-with-benefits arrangement—it also means leaving behind the typical, somewhat reliable guidelines of traditional dating.

It’s a harder, murkier path, but for some Gen Zers, it feels like the safer one. Telling someone how you really feel about them carries the risk of intense discomfort, and many of us would rather avoid the potential conflict altogether. Maybe we’ll be greeted with an enthusiastic acceptance of our affections, but it’s just as likely that these “define-the-relationship” moments will end in tears and hurt feelings.

These moments are hard, and the blurred boundaries of a situationship make it easier to avoid—or at least delay—them, no matter what side of the arrangement you find yourself on. For the partner on the losing side of a situationship, the arrangement works to delay inevitable rejection. Unrequited love hurts, and persisting in a situationship satisfies an immediate desire to stay with your partner, even if one can sense that, deep down, they’ll never get the commitment they actually want.

Of course, these conversations are difficult for everybody, not just Gen Z. No one likes to be rejected, and loving someone is vulnerable at any age. But Gen Z’s particularly high levels of risk aversion makes “What are we?” discussions harder than they have to be, and the normalization of situationships provides a tempting way to opt out of discomfort.

A situationship also makes it easier to break up with someone without, well, actually breaking up with them. “Ghosting”—ending a relationship by suddenly cutting off communication—has long haunted the cultural lexicon. In a 2023 survey, 77 percent of Gen Zers said they’ve ghosted someone before, and 84 percent of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they had been ghosted, 10 percent of them after several months of dating.

The rise of situationships “represents the continuing expression of the ambiguity that our contemporary culture offers,” says Brad Wilcox, who is a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia as well as the author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Mediating our relationships online, Wilcox argues, has “further degraded young adults’ capacity … to have those challenging and difficult conversations both at the start of a relationship, but also in the midst of a relationship.”

Situationships enable all manner of antisocial behavior. If someone was never really your girlfriend or boyfriend, many young people believe you don’t owe them the satisfaction of a face-to-face conversation explaining why you don’t want to see them anymore. Breaking up with a girlfriend of several months over text or ghosting is cruel. But in a situationship, the etiquette is much less defined.

In the early days of the pandemic, I struck up a virtual flirtation with another student at my university. I was clawingly lonely—a one-two punch of lockdown and a dizzying breakup. A few Zoom dates became hourslong nightly video calls. When I went back to our college town to move my remaining possessions out of my apartment, we spent 36 straight hours together.

The problem was, I knew almost immediately that I didn’t like him. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, really. I just had the nearly immediate, gut-level feeling that he wasn’t for me. But he was someone to talk to, and more importantly for my bruised ego, he was someone who wanted to talk to me.

In the end, I used a petty political disagreement to end our quasi-relationship. The new school year was beginning, and even with stringent COVID restrictions, I couldn’t plausibly reject his offers to meet in person again. It was the coward’s way out, but I had let the emotional entanglement go on for far too long to be honest without seeming unforgivably cruel.

When I feel self-serving, I chalk up my behavior to a form of COVID-era psychosis. It was an embarrassing and unkind lapse in judgment. But whose judgment wouldn’t be impaired by months spent practically alone?

Too many young people haven’t emotionally progressed from the pandemic. In December 2020, 38 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds agreed that they experienced “feeling loneliness a lot of the day yesterday.” While that percentage had declined to 24 percent by February 2023, young adults still soared above the adult average of 13 percent. In all, twentysomethings in early 2023 were just as lonely as the adult average during the thick of lockdowns.

Situationships seem almost inevitable when more young people are lonely—those on both ends of the arrangement are more likely to stick with a situationship if it feels like it’s their only source of companionship. In turn, that loneliness feeds into another preexisting risk aversion: Being alone is scarier than ending an unsatisfying half-relationship.

Further, it’s easier to slide into something murky and undefined when you don’t have concrete expectations of what romantic relationships are even supposed to be like. Fewer young people have even had a traditional dating experience. In 2023, 76 percent of Gen Xers reported having a boyfriend or girlfriend during their teen years. For Gen Z’s young adults, it was just 56 percent.

Finding romantic stability shouldn’t be reserved for only the most gregarious—or obnoxiously persistent, depending on whom you ask—among us. But when risk aversion is the norm, anything other than passivity starts to seem terribly embarrassing: too eager, too excitable, and painfully needy.

“People definitely now have this horrible habit of ironic distance, and not wanting to be the person to ‘catch feelings’ first, because that implies a level of vulnerability,” Maria Pattison, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, told me. “If you just say, ‘Oh, well, we’re in a situationship,’ the responsibility of having to sort through your feelings … is completely waved away by this highly casual term.”

Maintaining that sense of “ironic distance” is a social imperative in many Gen Z circles. One of the worst social sins is being “cringe”—basically, overly earnest, cloying, and completely unaware of just how stupid you look. Enthusiasm, much less genuine emotion, can even be perceived as a kind of horrible oversharing.

“Ya’ll ever notice how stupid and embarrassing and ugly and cringe you get when you like someone?” said one young woman in a TikTok video with 1.5 million views. “When you like them, you care so much what they think about you and it fucks you up.”

Many of us now fear getting caught experiencing desire itself. It’s fine to want sex, but to want something deeper—an intimate, unguarded emotional connection—betrays a terribly uncool weakness. A renewed obsession with attachment theory has produced a glut of social media influencers who argue that a desire for frequent communication or affection from one’s partner is a sign of deep psychological damage. Caring at all—wanting to be loved—is all too easily pathologized.

This pressure inevitably has a gendered impact. A cool person—a cool girl in particular—has plenty of sex, but also experiences an almost inhuman lack of real desire. This figure is aspirational precisely because her lack of wanting means she can never really be rejected—her partners always like her more than she likes them. Lux Lisbon from The Virgin Suicides and Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World are just a couple of the examples that come to mind. Films like Lady Bird and Shiva Baby both focus on young women who try desperately but ultimately fail to be sexually adventurous but emotionally disinterested cool girls.

Dolly Alderton’s 2023 novel Good Material vividly captures why so many people fear allowing themselves to care deeply about a relationship. In the book, Andy, a 35-year-old stand-up comedian, is abruptly left by Jen, his girlfriend of almost four years. He muddles through the devastating breakup, eventually striking up a situationship with a 23-year-old woman named Sophie. Andy realizes he wants to end their relationship once he notices that Sophie, who had been affecting disinterest in formally dating him, is more interested than she had been letting on.

“A change in power has occurred and neither of us realized what was happening until it was done. In my experience, it happens in every single relationship that fails,” Andy says to himself. “It happened the other way around with me and Jen, which now feels almost unimaginable. Jen was the one who wouldn’t leave me alone in the very beginning. Then about three and a half months in, something shifted. I became the person who was more interested, who was pushing for more time together. She became the manager of Us—I would ask for things and she would grant them to me.”

“She was the one with all the power,” he concludes. “Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.”

Maintaining this sense of power has its downsides. Forcing yourself to appear disinterested ultimately makes your own feelings a source of secret shame—they become negative, inspiring guilt rather than excitement. As a result, we’ve embarked on a cohort-wide game of hard-to-get—preserving our dignity but compromising our chance to experience the companionship of another person who sees and loves you as you are.

But why do so many young people fear earnestness so much? What’s so uniquely terrible about neediness? Or even just having needs at all? For many Gen Zers, an online adolescence—spent at once on full public display, yet isolated from the close personal relationships that matter most—has made us pathologically defensive.

Ironically, as Gen Zers arrived in adolescence already performing themselves online, we’ve reached a strange impasse. So used to having cameras trained on our every move, presenting the best, most flattering version of ourselves at all times, many young people now act as if everyone is always watching. The fear of being uncool, of letting our true thoughts bubble too close to the surface, pervades our thoughts, even when alone.

Growing up under this self-imposed spotlight—constantly performing, always one misstep away from online shame—does to romance what having constant access to hundreds of images of yourself inevitably does to body image. Just as those pesky candid photos can make you painfully aware of physical flaws you would have never noticed in a less digital age, living online exposes you to all the cringe-inducing ways social interaction can go wrong. Avoiding hundreds of possible blunders renders it nearly impossible to loosen up and be yourself around someone else, something that’s essentially required if you want to find a fulfilling relationship.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that the average teenager spent 4.8 hours a day on social media, raising the question of how many adolescents ever disengage from this kind of public performance.

As a result, we’ve become stage actors in our own lives, eagerly performing for an online audience, but so afraid of social error, afraid of causing offense, afraid of having our desires perceived, that intense self-protection seems not just safe, but morally correct. There is a prevailing sense that a good person relies on others as little as possible—no one wants to ask their friends to perform “emotional labor,” or be guilty of “trauma dumping.” Getting close to someone and seeking their emotional intimacy is frequently cast as burdensome.

You can find this shift in something as seemingly innocuous as increasing rates of phone call anxiety among youth. For many young people, any form of communication that requires someone’s immediate attention has become generally stigmatized. Texts are fine, but don’t expect prompt responses. Out-of-the-blue phone calls are for emergencies and are frequently answered with a mix of confusion and concern. Meanwhile, browsing the feeds of popular relationship influencers targeting young people gives the impression that we should aim to be atomized hyperindividuals who rely on others as little as possible. Asking your partner for attention, comfort, or even fidelity (the rise in polyamory seems driven in part by the idea that it’s unfairly stifling to not want your partner to sleep with other people) is asking undue labor of them. Maybe they should draw better boundaries, maybe you’re toxic, maybe you have an anxious attachment style. Related From Slate Tanya Chen What Serial Daters and Matchmakers Alike Think We Should Do About Our Dating Crisis Read More

“Now I understand why people be single for so long,” reads the text of one viral TikTok video. “It’s like, once you become single and understand how worthy your peace is you just don’t wanna give that up for just anybody.”

Too many young people seem to believe that romantic relationships primarily exist as an add-on to an already fully realized life, rather than a union with a flawed person with whom you’re building something greater than the sum of your parts. When mutual acceptance is tossed aside in favor of a single-minded drive to “protect our peace,” our relationships become brittle and transactional.

Unhappy situationships, like all other doomed romances, end eventually. You can’t escape the risk of a devastating breakup by feigning disinterest. But unlike in a formal relationship, you end up with a lot less to hold on to when all is said and done. I asked Maria, my friend who dated someone without really dating him at all, if sliding into a situationship ever saved her any heartbreak. “No,” she told me. “It did not save me any hurt whatsoever.”

“By not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable,” college sophomore Jordana Narin wrote in a 2015 Modern Love essay. While the phenomenon Narin describes wasn’t yet called a “situationship,” she vividly describes the muddled heartbreak at the end of one. “What we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity to move on.” Popular in Life

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The problem, though, is that a life spent avoiding pain at all costs is inevitably a small and lonely one. You can’t find love without the risk of loss. It speaks to a deficiency of meaning in our culture that so many young people are looking at this tradeoff and deciding that avoiding heartbreak and rejection is more important than finding lasting partnership. Other people, it seems, just aren’t worth the unpredictability they invariably bring into our lives.

Gen Zers are setting themselves up to be one of the loneliest generations in recent memory. Too many of us will spend our adulthood without emotional intimacy and without the relationships that marked our parents’ and grandparents’ lives. It’s not too late to change course, but cultural trends as pervasive as this are hard to dislodge.

Young people desperately want to be happy. But too many of us don’t know how or can’t access the bravery to open our lives to it. What allows us to save face in the short term is precisely what’s leading to long-term dissatisfaction. We know, deep down, where to find the way out. The question is whether we can summon the courage to begin.

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The more kindly you act, the more beautiful you appear. And the more consistently you are kind—the more kindness is seen as a fundamental part of your character—the more impact it has on how other people rate your looks.

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The “True Sensation” dildo is a fleshy, silicone tool that measures exactly 7 inches and has the ability to vibrate (three different frequencies), thrust (seven different speeds), and self-heat (up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s just like the real thing, James Guo, the founder of Our Erotic Journey, assures me from his office in Irvine, California. Best of all—everything is controlled through the app AMZ.

“It connects to someone that’s oceans away,” he says of its potential for creating all kinds of sexual fantasies. Teasingly, he adds: “There’s also music that can match the intensity of the vibration.”

True Sensation is just one offering featured among the wide inventory of Our Erotic Journey, the sex toy brand Guo launched in 2019. Its online store, which boasts more than 200 products, is a pleasure chest of sexual self-amusement. Take your pick: There’s the lipstick-shaped vibrator, a remote-controlled rotating butt plug, various cock rings, something called the “Gravity Rocket” (a clitoral suction vibrator with seven massage modes), and a smattering of glow-in-the-dark accessories. “Those are for the ravers,” Guo jokes.

The sex tech market is estimated to triple by 2030, exceeding $100 billion globally in sales. The demand for products, from AI-assisted companions and personal wand massagers to sexual wellness apps, sits at an all-time high. At a moment when industry trends favor artificial intelligence and remote sex exploration, Guo just wants to make eccentric, high-quality vibrators. He’s betting big on toys.

In the years since launch, Guo has built Our Erotic Journey into a quietly influential brand through intentionally whimsical designs and an insistence on quality products. “I know production,” Guo says. His family, he tells me, owns an auto-parts factory in China, and what he learned from the business—how the factory system runs, the science of machines, what style of packaging attracts customers—he leveraged for OEJ.

Guo admits that the initial product line—about 20 toys, of which the Sec Duo vibrator for couples remains a company best-seller—was devised to “fit the market.” “We self developed the first batch through modding, R&D, scaling, all that stuff,” he says. “Everything since that represents more of who we are.”

That’s how OEJ’s six themed collections came to be. The Cristal collection is for glass toys while the Space, Thrillz, and Lit collections are for truly uninhibited pleasure seekers (one features a dildo called “The Girthquake,” that exploits a specific, if sometimes worn out, racial fantasy).

But where Guo, who is 35, sometimes falls short in imagination, he more than makes up for in vigilance. “Users expect and deserve products that meet stringent safety standards, and any deviation can damage a brand’s reputation irrevocably,” he posted in an XBIZ editorial in September. “Partner with trusted white-label manufacturers rather than gamble on the unknowns.”

When I ask Guo about the editorial, he stresses that the success of sex tech is determined as much by the innovation involved in the products as the quality. “We want to be more of a bridge from human to human,” Guo says, “not just from toy to human.”

Even with promising market projections—another estimate goes so far as to predict sales could surpass $121 billion by 2030—industry analysts are not convinced that the future of sex tech is in toys.

It’s a “very oversaturated market that is now avoided by many,” says Olena Petrosyuk, a partner at the consulting firm Waveup. This year, she adds, investors “are looking away from ‘commoditized’ trends”—sex toys, but also sex content and social platforms. “Many failed to prove the economics and scale. The category is still fairly stigmatized,” she says. “OnlyFans being a massive exception.”

So what do consumers want? Petrosyuk says wellness, AI, and immersive realities are hot right now. “Practically every new sex tech startup is thinking in terms of AI use cases,” she says. “If it’s AI toys—companies are looking into how they can anticipate and respond to the user’s needs. If it’s robotics—we see companies looking into sex bots. If it’s content—it’s hyperpersonalized sex personas.”

Guo tells me he is not phased by talk of AI sex robots—“a low-volume business,” in his estimation—because many people cannot afford the high price tag. Continued success, he believes, is will come by expanding on the company’s themed collections. OEJ works directly with US and Canadian distributors; it is not a direct-to-consumer business, though he says customers do occasionally order via the online store.

Although ecommerce is the industry standard in retail and electronics, taking more of an old-school approach works for Guo. Next year, OEJ plans to launch a Zodiac collection, crafting 12 unique toys for each astrological sign. It’s an appeal to the Co–Star fanatics of Gen Z. “Every generation is different,” he says.

The company’s mostly nonexistent social media presence only seems to add to their Wonka-like mystery. “We’re just bad at it,” Jerry Chen, an operations assistant, says. “We’re really focused on production.”

For now, that business model seems to be a hit. Our Erotic Journey recently won the “Best Pleasure Product Manufacturer—Small” prize at the 2023–2024 AVN Awards in Las Vegas, a litmus test for newbie brands in the adult content world. OEJ also received the O Award for Outstanding New Product for “Sexy Pot,” Guo’s marijuana-leaf-shaped vibrator, a customer favorite.

Clearly wanting to capitalize on its unexpected success, Guo says, “It’s time we gave it a sister or brother.”

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A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology offers new insights into how testosterone might affect men’s interpretations of women’s social signals. Researchers found that testosterone heightened men’s sensitivity to specific friendly cues, particularly among men who viewed themselves as more attractive, though it did not broadly increase the tendency to overestimate women’s romantic interest.

Men’s tendency to sometimes over-interpret friendly cues from women as romantic interest, known as the “sexual misperception bias,” has long intrigued psychologists. Some suggest this bias may be a result of evolutionary pressures, given that misinterpreting interest might have had greater reproductive consequences than occasional misjudgments. In terms of reproductive success, a missed opportunity to connect with a mate could have more impact than a rare mistaken advance.

Testosterone is a hormone commonly associated with mating and social behaviors, and researchers believe it may influence men’s perception of social cues. Although previous studies have examined testosterone’s effects on behavior and attraction, little was known about whether it directly shapes men’s interpretations of social interactions with women. This study aimed to fill that gap by exploring testosterone’s effect on men’s perception of romantic interest in social scenarios.

“I have long been interested in bridging ultimate and proximate levels of explanation, that is evolutionary explanations of the why questions (what is X for?) and explanations of the how question (what are the mechanisms responsible for X?),” said study author Stefan M. M. Goetz, who is affiliated with Michigan State University’s Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health.

“The sexual overperception hypothesis has become a key example in evolutionary psychology. It suggests that due to the adaptive advantage of minimizing missed mating opportunities, men tend to overestimate sexual interest,” Goetz explained. “While researchers have studied many ‘how’ questions on sex differences in behavior, few have investigated whether testosterone, a hormone mediating male-typical traits, links to this bias—and none has shown causal evidence.”

The researchers studied a group of 190 heterosexual men aged 18 to 40. These participants, recruited through media, databases, and universities, were randomly assigned in a double-blind setup to receive either 11 milligrams of testosterone or a placebo. This meant neither the participants nor the researchers knew who had received the actual hormone.

After the administration, participants interacted briefly with a female research assistant, who was instructed to behave in a friendly but non-flirtatious manner. Two additional observers, unaware of the study’s purpose, later rated video recordings of the interactions to ensure the assistant’s behavior appeared consistently friendly.

Following the interaction, participants completed questionnaires to assess their perceptions of the assistant’s interest and their own levels of attractiveness. This setup allowed the researchers to investigate how participants’ self-perceived attractiveness influenced their interpretation of the interaction, especially among those who received testosterone.

The researchers found that testosterone did not broadly increase men’s tendency to overinterpret friendliness as romantic interest. However, testosterone appeared to increase sensitivity to specific friendly behaviors, but only in men who rated themselves as moderately or highly attractive. Men with lower self-perceived attractiveness did not show a stronger response to friendly cues after receiving testosterone, suggesting the hormone’s effect may depend on a person’s self-image.

Interestingly, testosterone also appeared to increase men’s tendency to “project” their own romantic interest onto the female assistant, particularly among those who saw themselves as more attractive. For example, men who rated themselves highly attractive and received testosterone were more likely to interpret friendly cues as romantic interest if they were also interested in a connection with her.

Goetz highlighted five key takeaways from the research: “First, and this is true of the sexual misperception literature in general, guys, when you first meet a woman, she is probably not interested in having sex with you,” he explained. “In fact, for both men and women, the base rate of interest is quite low; men’s just happens to be slightly higher, which leads to the well-documented overperception bias among men. Second, people tend to infer other people’s mental states by projecting our own.”

“Third, overperception is particularly acute if a man thinks that he is attractive. However, this doesn’t mean that a woman won’t ever be interested in him. For one, attractive men (self-perceptions are correlated) do receive greater sexual interest from others, and these men may learn to incorporate this into their perceptions despite the resultant overperception. Past research has suggested that, especially for attractive men, prolonged courtship can generate reciprocal attraction. However, this should not be taken as encouragement to pursue someone who has shown no interest—persistent unwanted advances constitute harassment and should be avoided.”

“Fourth, testosterone likely plays a role in generating overperception, particularly among men who think of themselves as being attractive, and increases the tendency to project one’s own interest,” Goetz continued.

“Finally, I want readers to understand that testosterone does not cause ‘masculine’ behavior in a straightforward, ineluctable manner. Gendered behaviors are the result of a complex mix of social and biological factors. Cultural stereotypes of testosterone as the sole cause of masculine behavior have not been borne out by the data. For one, in our study we did not observe a main effect of testosterone, meaning that other factors (individual differences and contextual factors), in conjunction with testosterone, influenced these behaviors. Additionally, while these effects were detectable across a large sample of men, knowing an individual’s testosterone level will not be very informative with respect to his behavior.”

While this study sheds light on the influence of testosterone on social perception, there are some limitations to consider. For one, the use of a single female confederate during a brief interaction may limit the generalizability of the findings, as her specific style of friendliness could have affected the results. In future research, incorporating a variety of female participants with differing interaction styles and involving more naturalistic settings could give a clearer picture of how testosterone affects perceptions in varied contexts.

“The interaction was very brief, lasting only three minutes,” Goetz said. “While people do rapidly form impressions of others, sussing out mental states over the course of a single interaction likely requires more time. I would like to see these results replicated and extended to situations that more closely resemble human courtship; that is, repeated encounters.”

Additionally, the study only provided a single dose of testosterone, limiting conclusions about the long-term effects of testosterone on social perception. Investigating longer-term hormone administration or comparing these results to those of natural hormonal changes could provide deeper insights into how testosterone influences these biases over time.

“We only tested the causal effect of acute changes in testosterone and only after a single dose,” Goetz explained. “(Basal testosterone was positively correlated with overperception, but in our design, it cannot be causally linked to perception—e.g., it could be the case that men who regularly overperceive sexual interest experience heightened testosterone as a result.) Many androgen-linked traits, including psychological traits, are to some degree shaped by organizational effects of androgens, which are largely permanent and emerge during developmental sensitive periods. Additionally, acute changes may become more apparent after repeated exposures.”

“The effect of current hormone levels often depends on these prior organizational effects. Intriguingly, facial masculinity may reflect levels of prenatal testosterone exposure; and facial masculinity has been linked to men’s self-perceived attractiveness. If facial masculinity is a useful proxy for organizational effects, including it in the statistical model could help to address whether the association with self-perceived attractiveness and perception stems from inflated self-appraisals and/or past experiences, or from organizational influences of testosterone which then amplify the influence of acute testosterone changes.”

“In a similar manner, some research indicates that sensitivity to acute changes in testosterone depends on basal levels,” Goetz added. “Reported in the supplemental material, we found that the effect of acutely raising testosterone on projection of long-term sexual interest was smaller among men with higher basal testosterone, suggesting that those with lower baseline levels were more sensitive to equivalent increases in testosterone. Thus, sensitivity to acute changes may be an important factor in moderating testosterone’s effects.”

These findings enhance our understanding of hormone-driven social behavior and pave the way for further research into the nuanced ways testosterone may shape human interactions, potentially validating evolutionary explanations.

“Ultimately, I believe greater attention to proximate mechanisms can help establish the validity of evolutionary explanations,” Goetz said. “If putatively adaptive sex differences such as men’s sexual overperception can be shown to be causally mediated by sex hormones, this strengthens evolutionary accounts while challenging purely sociocultural explanations. The same is true if the reverse is found.”

“I think this research illustrates the value of integrating different levels of analysis in psychology. Understanding both why a behavior exists (evolutionary explanations) and how it works (biological mechanisms) gives us a more complete picture. Plus, this kind of work helps demystify the role of hormones like testosterone in human behavior—showing they’re part of a complex system rather than simple triggers of stereotypical male behavior. Recent methodological advancements in behavioral endocrinology are finally enabling researchers to address testosterone’s causal role in human behavior.”

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