When Men Are Aroused, Revealing Clothing May Overshadow a Woman’s Rejection

Sexual arousal can skew men’s perceptions of women’s interest in flirting, prompting them to focus on revealing clothing rather than clear facial cues of rejection. A new study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that this bias is strongest among men with manipulative and entitled sexual attitudes.

The study, titled 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, provides experimental evidence that arousal can deepen existing cognitive blind spots around sexual boundaries.

In everyday social encounters, people interpret a mixture of broad and momentary signals. Broad, or global, cues include attractiveness, body language and how revealing someone’s clothing is. Momentary, or specific, cues come from expressions and gestures that communicate interest or rejection in real time.

Misunderstandings can arise when observers prioritize global cues such as sexualized clothing over specific signals like a frown or a turned-away gaze. Psychologists have linked this overreliance on global cues to misreading consent and, in some cases, a higher risk of sexually aggressive behavior.

Inside the new experiment

Researchers led by Ingo Landwehr at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz recruited 284 heterosexual men for an online decision-making task. Participants viewed pairs of photographs of the same woman in which clothing and facial expressions had been systematically altered.

In the images, women wore either casual outfits or provocative clothing, while their faces displayed either flirtatious interest or clear rejection. During each trial, the men had just over two seconds to choose which woman appeared more likely to be flirting with them.

Some trials involved low conflict, with clothing and facial expressions matching stereotypes — for example, a flirtatious woman wearing revealing clothing compared with a rejecting woman in casual clothes. Other trials created high conflict by pairing a casually dressed woman with a warm, inviting expression against a provocatively dressed woman displaying a rejecting facial expression.

Because facial expressions provided a direct signal of intent, the correct choice in high-conflict trials was the casually dressed but smiling woman. The provocatively dressed woman displaying rejection served as a distractor, allowing researchers to measure how strongly participants relied on global cues.

How arousal changed decisions

The men initially completed 52 trials in a non-aroused baseline condition. They then answered questionnaires assessing sexual desire, objectification of others, sexual entitlement and antagonistic personality traits such as narcissism and psychopathy, which are often grouped under the Dark Triad.

Participants then listened to a five-minute explicit erotic audio story designed to induce sexual arousal. Immediately afterward, they completed another 52 trials, allowing researchers to compare their performance before and after arousal.

The researchers tracked both accuracy and response time. Following arousal, men responded more quickly overall, suggesting greater motivation or urgency. However, their error rates increased in high-conflict trials, particularly when a woman displaying rejection was wearing provocative clothing.

Under sexual arousal, many participants became increasingly likely to choose the woman whose clothing signaled sexual availability, even when her facial expression clearly communicated rejection. A subgroup of men performed particularly poorly, making errors in at least half of the high-conflict trials while aroused.

Personality traits and risk factors

The researchers identified a cluster of characteristics they described as sexual manipulativeness, exploitativeness and disinhibition. Men who scored highly on this factor, as well as those with stronger sexual entitlement, were the most likely to misinterpret conflicting cues while sexually aroused.

For these men, sexual arousal appeared to amplify existing biases rather than create them from scratch. Their attention increasingly focused on global cues associated with potential sexual reward, while direct facial expressions of rejection were more likely to be sidelined or overlooked.

This pattern aligns with the concept of motivational myopia, in which intense physical drives such as hunger, pain or sexual arousal narrow attention toward immediate gratification. In such a state, internal goals can override clear external information, including signals related to sexual consent.

The findings suggest that examining how people process conflicting social cues while aroused could help identify individuals at higher risk of violating sexual boundaries. The relatively simple keyboard task used in the experiment may also offer a practical tool for future clinical or forensic assessments.

Limits and future directions

The authors acknowledge several limitations in the study design. The baseline condition always came before the sexual arousal condition, meaning fatigue or boredom could have contributed to some of the errors observed during the second round of trials.

Error rates increased toward the end of the experiment, suggesting that declining engagement may partly explain poorer performance over time. Future studies that randomize task order or include additional control conditions could help determine how much of the observed effect is attributable specifically to sexual arousal.

The sample also consisted of self-selected, internet-based volunteers from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. Such WEIRD samples may not fully represent patterns of sexual perception and behavior across different populations and cultures.

Future research could examine whether other forms of physiological arousal, including stress, fear or nonsexual excitement, similarly distort social judgments. Studies involving women and non-heterosexual participants could also help determine whether these perceptual biases are gender-specific or more broadly shared.

Despite these limitations, the research highlights how sexual arousal can interfere with the interpretation of social cues, particularly among men with problematic sexual attitudes. The findings reinforce a central principle of consent education: appearance or clothing does not outweigh a person’s facial expressions, words or clear signals of rejection.

Article prepared by Victoria Caldwell.