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A smile is just a smile

Don't kid yourself, she's only checking out your credentials

WOMEN really do lead men on for the first few minutes after they meet but
without knowing it, says an Austrian scientist.

Karl Grammer of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Urban Ethology in Vienna
and his colleagues studied 45 male-female pairs of strangers in their teens and
early twenties. Even when women find the man unappealing, they don’t send clear
rejection signals to begin with, the researchers found.

Women chat happily, send sexually explicit signals and encourage the man’s
attention, even if they have absolutely no interest in him. This gives a woman
time to assess a man, says Grammer, essential in human courtship, since pairing
off is much riskier for the female. The only time women were negative at all was
when a man talked too much.

Each couple was told they would be rating videos, then left alone in a room
while the experimenter excused himself to answer a telephone call. During his
10-minute absence, the pair were videotaped through a one-way mirror.

The researchers analysed the encounter using three types of information.
First, they asked the volunteers to rate the physical attractiveness of the
other person and whether they’d go out on a date with them if invited. Then the
researchers analysed the video frame by frame, looking for known courtship
signals. For women, these include head-tossing, hair-flipping and fiddling with
their clothes. They also noted any “rejection” signals. Finally, the researchers
measured how much the couple spoke to each other.

Although the women always started encounters with a stranger with many
classical solicitation behaviours, after a few minutes their actions started to
reflect their real feelings. Importantly, the women also seemed to control the
encounter—what the women did had a direct effect on how the men behaved
next. “You can predict male behaviour from female behaviour but not the other
way round,” says Grammer. A woman’s nod, for instance, kept a man talking.

  • More at:
    Evolution and Human Behavior (vol 21, p 371)