Guide to Flirting
By Paul
An interesting article from the latest edition of The Economist; Flirting-Don't misunderestimate yourself;
“Dr Hill showed heterosexual men and women photographs of people. She asked them to rate both how attractive those of their own sex would be to the opposite sex, and how attractive the members of the opposite sex were. She then compared the scores for the former with the scores for the latter, seen from the other side. Men thought that the men they were shown were more attractive to women than they really were, and women thought the same of the women.Dr Hill had predicted this outcome, thanks to error-management theory—the idea that when people (or, indeed, other animals) make errors of judgment, they tend to make the error that is least costly. The notion was first proposed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, two of Dr Hill's colleagues, to explain a puzzling quirk in male psychology.
As studies show, and many women will attest, men tend to misinterpret innocent friendliness as a sign that women are sexually interested in them. Dr Haselton and Dr Buss reasoned that men who are trying to decide if a woman is interested sexually can err in one of two ways. They can mistakenly believe that she is not interested, in which case they will not bother trying to have sex with her; or they can mistakenly believe she is interested, try, and be rejected. From an evolutionary standpoint, trying and being rejected comes at little cost, except for hurt feelings. Not trying at all, by contrast, may mean the loss of an opportunity to, among other things, spread one's DNA.”
Related;
Interview with Martie Haselton (podcast)
Study links women's fashion sense to ovulation
Looking Good-Our obsession with physical appearance may not be so shallow, after all;
“A Polish researcher named Grazyna Jasienska recently designed an experiment to determine whether symmetrical women have higher levels of the key reproductive hormone estradiol. In the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, her team reports the results. They compared the left and right ring fingers of 183 Polish women between the ages of 24 and 36. Women whose fingers differed in length by more than two millimeters formed the asymmetrical group. Their average estradiol levels were 13 percent lower than the symmetrical group average.When the scientists screened out rural women, whose economic status and harder lives could skew their hormone levels, the difference in average hormone levels between symmetrical and asymmetrical urban women rose to 28 percent.
Marquardt's work has an artistic spin to it. Like Euclid, Leonardo da Vinci and Le Corbusier before him, the doctor became fascinated with the possibility that beauty itself could be quantified. His instincts told him that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. "I didn't find that to be true," he explains in an interview. "Guys seem to agree. They may argue over whether they prefer Michelle Pfeiffer or Kim Basinger, but you never hear anyone say Roseanne Barr." He had always been mathematically inclined, so, beginning in the early 1970s, Marquardt set out to compile the measurements of beautiful faces. He focused on people who were paid for being attractive -- movie stars and face models. His colleagues scoffed: "Every doctor I talked to told me I was nuts," he recalls.”
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