Flirting Behaviors Are Different For Everyone

How do you flirt with a potential mate? Researchers at the University of Kansas note how it's not quite the same for everyone.

"Researchers have long known that many verbal and nonverbal behaviors are linked to underlying attraction, but this is the first study to show that different ways of communicating attraction reveal a person's flirting style," said Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, in a news release. "How you flirt says a lot about what flirting means to you."

For the study, they observed 51 pairs of opposite-sex heterosexual strangers who had self-identified their flirting styles via a questionnaire. The participants all sat down and were asked to interact with a potential partner for 10-12 minutes while they were videotaped. 

Researchers discovered 36 verbal flirting codes, from making compliments to asking questions and more--identifying several flirting styles, including sincere, polite, traditional, physical, playful and more.

Sincere flirters seemed to show attraction through self-disclosure and focused attention. Other more traditional flirts were more likely to adopt an open body posture and lean in during conversation. However, polite flirts were the most difficult to gauge, according to researchers.

"A polite flirt tends to be very hands-off and respectful, but as you can imagine, this type of flirting isn't obvious to the people they're attracted to," Hall said. "They lean back, create even more space and are more even in verbal tone. For most people, it signals a lack of closeness, but polite flirts do it more the more attracted they become."

The physical flirts were even more confusing, as they gave relatively little compliments to someone who was a potential romantic mate.

"There's good reason why the physical style doesn't play out in a conversational environment," Hall said, "That's not where physical flirts go. It's not where they're most confident."

However, researchers still recognized a few things to be true when examining all flirting styles. Most people were generally subtle and therefore, difficult to determine if flirting was indeed happening. 

"We're really bad at detecting if people are flirting with us," Hall concluded. "We're great at knowing when they're not interested. But the reason we're bad at seeing when they are interested is people show it in such a variety of ways."

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).