Knowing someone is interested in you isn’t always as easy as it seems. Daters often misread signals from interactions as someone showing signs of romantic interest rather than simply being friendly. It can be even more complicated when you’re trying to figure out whether you’re securely in the “friend zone” or if there’s a potential to cross over to a romantic relationship with that person. Getting it wrong can often be a source of embarrassment or a source of hurt when it comes to self worth. Getting it wrong a lot can also leave you feeling jilted and pessimistic about approaching anyone.
With the advent of online relationships, daters often feel a sense of anonymity and will often rate rejection from a love interest as less hurtful. Even though most daters are aware that possible rejection is just part of the dating experience, how are we getting and wrong and what can we do about it?
Communication researchers Jeffery Hall, Chong Xing and Seth Brooks form the University of Kansas decided to look at the accuracy of detecting flirting. Armed with 52 pairs of heterosexual college students in his first study, he was eager to see how many people got it wrong and how many got it right when it came to interpreting possible flirtatious behavior.
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How it happened in study 1:
-Pairs of strangers sat in a room and talked for 10-12 minutes.
-Participants were told the study was on first impression and the participants were paired to talk about it.
-Participants filled out a questionnaire at the end of the study which asked them to note if they flirted and if they thought their interaction partner flirted.
What they found:
-80% of participants were accurate in their assessment that their partner did not flirt.
-Participants were less accurate in detecting when they were being flirted with.
-36% of men were correct while 18% of women were correct.
Hall believes that flirtatious behavior is hard to see and decifer because flirting can look a lot like being friendly. Furthermore, most people would not be overtly flirtatious because they don’t want to be embarrassed. According to Hall, we’re often not validated when we flirt that we often don’t have a good look at seeing what our own flirting looks like.
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What happened in Study 2:
-250 participants watched six one minute video clips of interactions from the first study.
What they found:
-3rd party observers were not any better at detecting flirting compared to those in the first study.
-66% were accurate in detecting flirting when it did not occur.
-38% were accurate in detecting flirting when it did occur.
-Lowest accuracy occurred when women were observing men flirt. They were only accurate 22% of the time.
-Both men and women were more accurate at detecting when women were flirting.
The reason that accuracy spike for women flirting put forth by researcher Jefferey Hall is perhaps women are simply more transparent when it comes to being interested. We also don’t assume that the people we come across most days are flirting with us. Hall advises those who want to refine their flirting detection to be open to the possibility that people are flirting especially in settings such as bars and parties.
Perhaps the most important factor in our inability to accurately detect someone flirting is because we’re reinforced by negative feelings of rejection when we get it wrong and when we do get it right, it’s not clear what exactly our partner saw as flirting behavior because we’re too busy running with it.
Amy Yew is a registered clinical counselor and relationship therapist. Tell us what you think and submit any questions you have to amyvancouvercourier@gmail.com. You can also tweet your thoughts on Twitter @AmyYew.
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