(RxWiki News) It's all about the swagger and the fluttering eyelashes. Really. Those are the personality traits that tend to help people predict who is attracted to them.
We all understand that dating can be brutal to the psyche and the self esteem. Believing in yourself and your own attractiveness makes a big difference in the success of your efforts, according to a recent study.
"Attractive personalities attract more interest."
German researchers conducted an experiment involving speed dating. This model was used because people are rarely honest in reporting what they really find attractive about another. When asked who they're attracted to, they lie. They'll say "honesty" is what turns them on, when really it's "hotness."
The study involved 17 groups of men (190) and women (192) who participated in a standard speed dating event, where they had "3-minute dates" with a number of people. Each person was asked who they thought would want to meet them.
Most people were pretty bad at guessing who was attracted to them, with some utterly clueless, and others having a better sense of their impact on others.
And the best predictors were men and women who probably don't need speed dating events to be dating. Men who were promiscuous and okay with casual sex knew who wanted to meet them. And women who had agreeable personalities were also good fortune tellers about who was attracted to them.
Mitja Back of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, who co-wrote the new paper, says that the casual sex guys behaved in a stereotypical fashion that evoked more typical or "I'm attracted" behavior in the women with whom they spoke. This dynamic helped the men accurately predict which women wanted to meet them.
Likewise, the affable women made the men more comfortable and likely to flirt. So these women were able to pick up on which of the men were interested and wanted to talk further.
Back led a team of researchers for this study. He says speed dating is a great model for studying male-female dating behaviors. He added that these three-minute dates are so illuminating that they could have been invented by psychologists.
This study will be published in Psychological Science.
