Do you ever find yourself out with friends when someone hot catches your eye? You take a deep breath, head over, give them your best smile and strike up a conversation, only to be unable to tell if they are flirting back with you? If this rings a bell, then you’re not alone.
It seems our weekends out might be full of missed opportunities. New research from the University of Kansas says we’re all pretty rubbish when it comes to detecting if someone is flirting with us. Apparently the key to letting someone know that you are really into them is to abandon all subtlety!
Dr. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communications studies and author of 2013 book The Five Flirting Styles, said: “If you think someone is not interested in you, you are probably right, they are not interested. But if someone is, you probably missed it.”
So how did he work that one out? In the experiment, Hall put 52 pairs of single, heterosexual men and women in a room and recorded each couple talking for 10-12 minutes. He then asked all of them to fill out questionnaires about their first impressions of the other person, including questions about whether they flirted during the conversation, and whether they thought their partners were flirting with them.
The results showed that people were great at detecting if people weren’t flirting, and got this right 80 per cent of time. Great! However, when their counterparts were flirting, men got it right 36 per cent of the time and women only 18 per cent of the time. Not so great…
According to Hall, people looking on to the conversations weren’t much better at detecting flirtees. They were good at seeing is someone wasn’t flirting with 66 per cent identifying this but they only detected flirting 38 per cent of the time. Again, the women fared slightly worse again, with only 22 per cent of them being able to tell if someone was at their flirty best with their partner.
Hall added: “Don’t assume everyone is flirting with you. Most people on most days are not flirting with everyone they come in contact with. But, some people are occasionally flirting, and maybe a few people are actually flirting a lot!”
Us? Well, we think the fact we don’t assume we are being flirted with means we are a modest lot. But people’s flirting techniques differ don’t they. From the polite, coy, cheeky and subtle to the cringey ‘OMG just flirt-on outta here”
What do you think? Flirt with us @lovestruck
ps: Has anyone ever told you.. you have really beautiful eyes…(yes, we are flirting)
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