Researchers at the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University, and the University of Texas confirmed that men are in fact intimidated by intelligent women, whether they realise it or not.
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Frank Sinatra claimed that he liked intelligent women because “when you go out, it shouldn’t be a staring contest”.
Results revealed that, in general, men “formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest” in the women who had performed better than them, rather than those who performed worse.
Psychologists from the University of Texas, Austin, found that men gave different answers depending on whether they were rating a woman as attractive, or actually considering a date with her.
Researchers blamed it on the fragile male ego.
During the second phase, the same group of men was asked if they would like to date such a woman in reality. A 2013 report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, for example, found men experienced lower self-esteem in the face of the success of their wives or girlfriends. The men who thought the women were smarter fell much less masculine when they were sitting by the smart ladies.
Men and women were paired off in a final scenario in which they took an intelligence test in the same room.
As the researchers put it, their findings suggest that there are “conditions under which self-protective concerns may trump qualities of partners that seem desirable at a distance”. When men actually meet women who are smarter than them, this once attractive trait instead becomes a turnoff. In first part, 105 men were given a hypothetical scenario involving women who had either underperformed or outperformed them in an intelligence test. These men were then asked to rank these women as a prospective romantic partner.
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Although more research is required to reach a concrete conclusion, the researchers reportedly believe that “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women who outperformed them”.
