I feel like there’s some implicit claim that only a subset of people (socially awkward men?) aren’t romantically perceptive, but my understanding is that basically everyone is bad at this and if you are going to flirt with someone you should expect that you are probably unable to tell whether they want it.[1]
Based on a community sample of real-life speed daters we were able to show that actual mate choices are not reciprocal, although people strongly expect their choices to be reciprocated and dating behaviour (flirting) is indeed strongly reciprocal.
I.e. people reciprocate flirting essentially independent of whether they are actually attracted to the other person, and the other person is essentially unable to distinguish “real” from “fake” flirting.
Furthermore, that paper had two “independent, trained raters” who watched recordings and marked if the person involved was flirting. These raters had interrater reliability of α=.68 which isn’t terrible, but isn’t amazing either.[2]
tl;dr: my guess is that most people should 1) not assume that they can reliably identify flirting and 2) even if they can, should not assume that they can reliably predict whether this flirting is indicative of romantic interest.
Of course, this also cuts the other way: people who you don’t think are attracted to you are sometimes attracted to you. But whatever risk/reward calculation you are running should include the fact that you are probably going to make mistakes here.
Obviously it’s possible to get reliable signals, e.g. if someone explicitly says “I don’t like you” then probably you can accurately guess that they don’t like you. This comment is referring to “normal” flirting signals like eye contact, touch, etc.
I assume these “trained raters” were grad students who had thought about the problem for a couple days or something, and I bet that if you actually genuinely studied this you could get good at it, but probably very few people are in that reference class.
I feel like there’s some implicit claim that only a subset of people (socially awkward men?) aren’t romantically perceptive
I don’t think that’s true and I think all the claims on the next list are much more likely true and more relevant to the argument:
On average men are more likely to be more assertive or aggressive when pursuing women than when the roles are reversed
On average women are more likely to be creeped out by being the target of unreciprocated sexual interest from a man than when the roles are reversed
On average women worry much more that rebuffing a man could lead to him getting angry and yelling at her than the other way around
On average women worry about being physically overpowered by a man much more than the other way around
On average if someone is trying to actively display uncomfortability with a situation in a subtle way, women are more likely to pick up on this than men are
On average women are more likely than men to find it very uncomfortable when subtle hints of uncomfortability are ignored
I’m less confident in 5 and 6 than 1-4, but I think the argument works even if those are ignored.
I also think the gender imbalance is important here. If men outnumber women in EA by around 5 to 2, then if everyone pursues X people of the opposite gender, the average man will be pursued by 2X/5 women and the average woman will be pursued by 5X/2 men. That’s the difference in being pursued by 2 people at the same time and being pursued by 12 or 13 people at the same time. Whatever harms there are are magnified very much for the women, in addition to each instance possibly causing more average harm when it’s towards the women due to points 1-6 above. Also simply being pursued by so many people in itself can be exhausting (I think breadthofdebate’s comment demonstrates this point). Even if there’s no “bad behaviour” and being pursued by one or two people is exciting and an ego boost, being pursued by a dozen might instead be demoralizing.
I mean I think if you’re attracted to like 90% of women you shouldn’t be DMing 90% of women “you up?”
but like a friend or someone you have a crush on? my view is they’re an adult and can handle hearing this and there are an astonishing number of ways people can screw up which are prevented by doing this ASAP
like if you look through the comments women are more saying “guys do X to try to sleep with me but retain plausible deniability for doing so when I would really just like to do X for its own sake” and less “hearing that guys are interested in me is an infohazard”
i think a lot of guys are rationalising about this out of a fear of getting rejected when the point is they should be making it easy to reject them.
I feel like there’s some implicit claim that only a subset of people (socially awkward men?) aren’t romantically perceptive, but my understanding is that basically everyone is bad at this and if you are going to flirt with someone you should expect that you are probably unable to tell whether they want it.[1]
An example paper largely chosen at random says:
I.e. people reciprocate flirting essentially independent of whether they are actually attracted to the other person, and the other person is essentially unable to distinguish “real” from “fake” flirting.
Furthermore, that paper had two “independent, trained raters” who watched recordings and marked if the person involved was flirting. These raters had interrater reliability of α=.68 which isn’t terrible, but isn’t amazing either.[2]
tl;dr: my guess is that most people should 1) not assume that they can reliably identify flirting and 2) even if they can, should not assume that they can reliably predict whether this flirting is indicative of romantic interest.
Of course, this also cuts the other way: people who you don’t think are attracted to you are sometimes attracted to you. But whatever risk/reward calculation you are running should include the fact that you are probably going to make mistakes here.
Obviously it’s possible to get reliable signals, e.g. if someone explicitly says “I don’t like you” then probably you can accurately guess that they don’t like you. This comment is referring to “normal” flirting signals like eye contact, touch, etc.
I assume these “trained raters” were grad students who had thought about the problem for a couple days or something, and I bet that if you actually genuinely studied this you could get good at it, but probably very few people are in that reference class.
I don’t think that’s true and I think all the claims on the next list are much more likely true and more relevant to the argument:
On average men are more likely to be more assertive or aggressive when pursuing women than when the roles are reversed
On average women are more likely to be creeped out by being the target of unreciprocated sexual interest from a man than when the roles are reversed
On average women worry much more that rebuffing a man could lead to him getting angry and yelling at her than the other way around
On average women worry about being physically overpowered by a man much more than the other way around
On average if someone is trying to actively display uncomfortability with a situation in a subtle way, women are more likely to pick up on this than men are
On average women are more likely than men to find it very uncomfortable when subtle hints of uncomfortability are ignored
I’m less confident in 5 and 6 than 1-4, but I think the argument works even if those are ignored.
I also think the gender imbalance is important here. If men outnumber women in EA by around 5 to 2, then if everyone pursues X people of the opposite gender, the average man will be pursued by 2X/5 women and the average woman will be pursued by 5X/2 men. That’s the difference in being pursued by 2 people at the same time and being pursued by 12 or 13 people at the same time. Whatever harms there are are magnified very much for the women, in addition to each instance possibly causing more average harm when it’s towards the women due to points 1-6 above. Also simply being pursued by so many people in itself can be exhausting (I think breadthofdebate’s comment demonstrates this point). Even if there’s no “bad behaviour” and being pursued by one or two people is exciting and an ego boost, being pursued by a dozen might instead be demoralizing.
i mean
this is the point of flirting? it is plausibly deniable?
i think a lot of the time flirting means, say “i’m not sure if i’m ~attracted to you and testing the waters would help me get data on this”
(i think poor social skills often cashes out as “not having things like this as hypotheses” rather than “being unable to read people”)
im honestly not sure if there’s a clear line between flirting and non-flirting.
if i knew i wanted to hook up with someone i would simply tell them
Even if you didn’t know anything yet about whether they were interested in you? That’s a big part of what (mutual!) flirting accomplishes, no?
I mean I think if you’re attracted to like 90% of women you shouldn’t be DMing 90% of women “you up?”
but like a friend or someone you have a crush on? my view is they’re an adult and can handle hearing this and there are an astonishing number of ways people can screw up which are prevented by doing this ASAP
like if you look through the comments women are more saying “guys do X to try to sleep with me but retain plausible deniability for doing so when I would really just like to do X for its own sake” and less “hearing that guys are interested in me is an infohazard”
i think a lot of guys are rationalising about this out of a fear of getting rejected when the point is they should be making it easy to reject them.