London, May 29 (IANS) Your success in dating depends on your picking up cues whether other people find you attractive and how they respond to your raw sex appeal.
The problem, of course, is that what people say they like about you – honesty, humour, and so on-may – have little to do with what they actually like, for example, hotness.
A new study finds that certain personality traits help you judge whether someone else thinks you have that appeal — worth a repeat meeting. It is one of a series to come out of a big speed-dating experiment held in Berlin about five years ago.
For instance, promiscuously-oriented men were better at guessing whether a woman would want to meet them, and women with a pleasing personality were better at guessing if they could allure men into meeting them.
Otherwise, people are very bad at guessing how many of the others will want to meet them. Some people had no clue at all. But others did better, according to the study.
‘Most of the prior research had worked with hypothetical scenarios, where people are asked by a questioner, ‘What kind of people would you like to get to know?’ and so on,’ says Mitja Back, of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, reports the journal Psychological Science.
‘Speed dating is a very good context to study dating behaviour. It’s almost like psychologists could have invented this,’ Back says, according to a Gutenberg statement.
He co-wrote the new paper with Lars Penke of the University of Edinburgh, Stefan Schmukle of Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster and Jens Asendorpf of Humboldt University Berlin.
Back was interested in another question: Is there something about personality that makes some people better at predicting whether others will want to meet them?
In 17 groups, a total of 190 men and 192 women met members of the opposite sex -basically the standard speed dating routine, but this time, with psychologists collecting a lot of data.
Among that data was personality information and the all-important question after each three-minute date: for each person you talk to, do you want to see that person again? They were also asked if they thought the other person would want to meet them.
Back thinks men who are inclined toward casual sex are displaying behaviour that’s very stereotypically associated with their sex; this may in turn evoke more typical behaviour in the woman they’re talking to, which could make them more accurate at predicting whether the woman will be interested.
Women who are agreeable, on the other hand, might make men more comfortable and more willing to flirt-which could make it easier to judge whether the man will want to meet them again.
