Shapiro Arthur G, Peters Rubie M, Ahrens Anthony H
American University, Washington, DC, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2024 Dec 31;19(12):e0315291. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0315291. eCollection 2024.
Misperceptions of the social world can lead to actions and social policy that are detrimental to an individual's or group's well-being. Here we investigate whether misperceptions arise when participants make predictions of the modal number of ideal future sexual partners reported by heterosexual cohorts (younger cohort: 18-23 years; older cohort: 24-29 years). For both men and women and in both cohorts, the modal number of reported partners equaled 1.0, but men's averages were higher than women's averages due to a subgroup of men who reported desiring large numbers of partners (that is, the distributions had the same shape, but men's distributions had a longer tail). Study 1: When asked to estimate the mode directly, participants performed poorly and, in some conditions, dramatically so (e.g., 40% of younger men reported wanting one sexual partner, but 0% of younger men predicted 1 to be the most frequent response). Study 2: When asked to estimate the shape of the whole distribution, participants underestimated the number of respondents who would desire the mode and thus replicated patterns in the literature for misestimations of skewed distributions. Study 3: When provided information about others' actual modal desired number of partners, the number of male participants who reported desiring one sexual partner increased, suggesting that misperceptions of social norms may influence preferences. We discuss how the mean and mode can lead to two accurate but different interpretations of the data (mean: men report desiring more sexual partners than women; mode: the most frequent response reported by both men and women is 1.0). Discrepancies of this sort can lead to mischaracterizations that may not be uncommon in the research literature. These discrepancies cannot be differentiated by significance tests that seek to find differences in the mean but can be resolved with attention to other methods of analyses.
对社会世界的误解可能会导致不利于个人或群体福祉的行为和社会政策。在此，我们调查当参与者预测异性群体（年轻群体：18 - 23岁；年长群体：24 - 29岁）报告的理想未来性伴侣的众数时，是否会出现误解。对于男性和女性以及两个群体而言，报告的伴侣众数均为1.0，但由于有一部分男性报告渴望大量伴侣（即分布形状相同，但男性的分布有更长的尾巴），男性的平均数高于女性的平均数。研究1：当被要求直接估计众数时，参与者表现不佳，在某些情况下，表现极差（例如，40%的年轻男性报告想要一个性伴侣，但0%的年轻男性预测1是最常见的回答）。研究2：当被要求估计整个分布的形状时，参与者低估了渴望众数的受访者数量，从而重现了文献中对偏态分布错误估计的模式。研究3：当提供关于他人实际期望伴侣众数的信息时，报告渴望一个性伴侣的男性参与者数量增加，这表明对社会规范的误解可能会影响偏好。我们讨论了均值和众数如何导致对数据的两种准确但不同的解释（均值：男性报告渴望的性伴侣比女性多；众数：男性和女性报告的最常见回答都是1.0）。这种差异可能导致在研究文献中并不罕见的错误描述。这些差异无法通过旨在发现均值差异的显著性检验来区分，但可以通过关注其他分析方法来解决。
