Love is like a game of poker. You shouldn't give away exactly how you feel too soon. At least according to a study published in Psychological Science.
College women found men more attractive if they weren't quite sure how the men felt about them.
The women had been told they were participating in a test of Facebook as a dating service. They were presented with college men who liked them “a lot” or liked them an “average” amount compared to 15 or 20 other women.
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Don't tell Mark Zuckerberg, but the men were actually fictitious.
Three different scenarios were set up. The women were told all four guys either:
(a) liked them "a lot,"
(b) liked them "only an average amount," or
(c) liked them "either a lot or an average amount."
The ambiguous group of guys (c) got the highest ratings from the ladies. The gentlemen who liked the women a lot (a) got the second highest marks, which is consistent with other research. In the paper, the researchers note that previous studies show females tend to like males who show affection for them. They called this the reciprocity principle.
Not surprisingly the fictitious cold fish (b), who found the women only average, scored lowest.
That women found ambiguous men most attractive was a new finding. It suggests that playing hard to get can help a man stay on a woman's mind, like a puzzle she wants to figure out.
So guys may want to plan for Valentine's Day accordingly.
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"Numerous popular books advise people not to display their affections too openly to a potential romantic partner and to instead appear choosy and selective," the authors, Erin Whitchurch and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University, wrote in the paper.
"When people first meet, it may be that popular dating advice is correct: Keeping people in the dark about how much we like them will increase how much they think about us and will pique their interest," they wrote.
So what do you think? What's your best dating advice? By the way, feel free to click the “like” button on this article, but Discovery News just wants to be friends.
IMAGE 1 : A cynical candy heart (Pschemp, Wikimedia Commons)
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