you like me at all.

Hey guys and gals, I’m Trace for DNews! Let’s talk about sex, baby. Specifically,

let’s talk about how we talk about it without talking about it. When someone is interested

in someone else, usually they don’t walk right up and announce it. Instead people rely

on the ancient art of flirtation. A smile, a joke, a double entendre if you know what

I mean.

We do this because flirtation tends to have a better success rate than outright declarations

of attraction, according to a University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist. But

declarative statements, while robotic and off putting, at least have the advantage of

being unambiguous. Flirting? Not so much.

First of all, people can have a lot of different reasons for flirting. According to research

out of Northern Illinois University, there are six reasons people flirt: casual fun,

testing the waters, increasing intimacy, boosting self-esteem, trying to gain something from

the other person, and of course, expressing sexual interest.

So the miscues happen when men and women misinterpret signals. Women either read too much into subtle

clues or miss them entirely about evenly. Men, on the other hand, see false positives

way more often and tend to see what they want to see. In a forthcoming study in Personality

and Individual Differences, researchers from Union College and Harvard asked nearly 500

men to imagine a woman in a nightclub who notices she’s being stared at and smiles

back. That wouldn’t be my reaction if 500 men were staring at me but anyway, the men

were then asked to gauge her level of interest.

First, the men were rated on whether they craved intimacy, or whether they distrusted

it. Those who ranked higher in distrust tended to think women were less interested in them

and didn’t see the smile as flirtation. But the men who craved intimacy tended to

project it on the woman. In other words, they imagined a completely hypothetical woman smiling

at them and thought, “Oh yeah, she totally digs me.”

Even when non-imaginary women are involved, men aren’t so great at reading their body

language. One study from the University of Indiana asked 280 male and female undergraduates

to look at pictures of women and determine if they were being friendly, sexually interested,

sad, or rejecting. The female participants hit the mark more often, while the males tended

to read too much into friendly body language. It’s tempting to think this is because men

are always looking for sex, but actually men often misread cues in the opposite direction

- they mistook sexual cues for simple friendliness.

Another small study conducted at the LWL University in Germany examined 22 men in fMRI machines

while they looked at pictures of men’s and women’s eyes and tried to guess what emotion

they were feeling. These men took longer and were less accurate when guessing womens’

emotions, and their amygdalae, which help interpret emotions and empathy, were less

active than when they looked in men’s eyes.

Of course, not all men are terrible at taking a hint. Some are quite skilled at it, while

some women struggle. But overall, according to some social science, men are more likely

to wrongly assume a woman is interested in them, than the other way around.

So how do you tell what she’s thinking without blowing it? Luckily for you, Tara has a video

explaining the correct way to flirt. Check it out here.

Let’s do a

little science too, guys and girls. How often would you say you misread clues and picked

up on something that wasn’t there? Or how often were you completely oblivious to someone

else’s advances? Let us know in the comments, or on facebook or Twitter @DNews, it should

make for fun reading. Subscribe for more and I’ll see you next time on DNews.