How disappointing is it when you feel like you’re putting your best flirting foot forward – giving the sexy eyes, smiling, laughing, etc. – only to feel like the other person isn’t flirting back and thus not interested? Well a recent study found, you might in fact, be wrong. More after the click.
From HuffPost:
You think you’ve got game. But when you try to chat someone up at the bar, you just can’t tell if they’re into you. Sound familiar? You’re not alone.
According to new research from the University of Kansas, we are lousy at being able to tell when someone’s flirting with us.
“If you think someone is not interested in you, you are probably right, they are not interested,” Dr. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communications studies at the university and author of The Five Flirting Styles, said in a written statement. “But if someone is, you probably missed it.”
Hall played matchmaker with 52 pairs of single, heterosexual men and women. He recorded each couple talking for about 10 minutes, and then had them fill out questionnaires about their first impressions of their partners — which included questions about whether they had flirted during the conversation, and whether they thought their partners had flirted.
What did Hall find? The students were good at figuring out when their partners were not flirting — they got this right around 80 percent of the time. But when it came to detecting when their partners actually were flirting, men got it right around 36 percent of the time. Women picked out the flirters around 18 percent of the time.
Here’s the part of the article that made me cringe – just imagine how many times, with how many interesting, cool people could this have happened to you:
In one of the pairs, both the man and woman said they were flirting, but neither one picked up on it. So, to recap: They meet-cute during a psych experiment about flirting. Sparks fly. He likes her, and she likes him, but neither of them thinks the other is into it.
Crazy. Another missed connection.
***
Read the rest of the article here; and original New York Magazine article, here. For the book, The Five Flirting Styles, click here.
How good are you at picking up if people are flirting with you or not?
