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Regardless of whether your conclusion is right, it doesn't follow from this argument. Even to someone for whom rape is worse than death, rape+death can be (and likely is) still worse than rape-without-death.
I want to believe this, but I didn't even expect the "bear" answer to be popular in the context of signalling, so I'm clearly not modeling people correctly ... if there are people who would answer "bear" as some weird rhetorical point, couldn't there be people who would decide "bear" in real life too? I'm imagining a woman hiking alone in a canyon (unprepared for any sort of combat), when a male hiker catching up to her shouts that the park rangers got a report of a bear further down the trail ... but I'm trying to imagine the woman then breaking into a run away from the man and toward the bear, and I just can't seem to do it, not without adding a bunch of assumptions that weren't in the viral question.
I think it's pretty difficult to construct a realistic hypothetical on which to test intuitions. Yours doesn't really work because the woman is choosing between an actual man and a report of a bear (by the man), which is a very different comparison.
That's a very good point ... but doesn't that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"? If we imagine instead that our hiker first saw the bear herself and turned around, and then encountered a man in between her and the trailhead, it feels even wilder to imagine her turning around a second time and taking her chances with the actual-bear after all.
Yes, that was my concern, I can definitely imagine a woman coming to the conclusion that a man making that claim was trying to trick her and steering clear. But I think your updated hypothetical is better, and I agree that very few if any would run towards the bear. A sight of an actual bear would act on someone at an instinctual level in a way that the word "bear" in a Twitter poll would not.
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