Are you looking for love, and think that playing hard to get makes you more attractive to potential partners?
Time to rethink, say researchers in a new study.
Starting to date someone means uncertainty, and that can be hard enough. One way to deal with these feelings may be to play hard to get in order to protect yourself, or because you think others will be more interested in you if you’re hard to get in.
But now new studies show the exact opposite. If you’re unsure of how interested someone is in you, you’ll be less interested in them yourself, writes Futurity.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have looked at several different large studies to see correlations between how uncertainty affects a person’s love interest. They conducted a study in which 51 women and 50 men between the ages of 19 and 31 were asked to chat with each other.
Participants were allowed to chat with strangers in the study
Subjects in the test were then shown a picture of a person they thought they were chatting with (who was in fact a researcher) and then told to send a final message to the person they were chatting with. Half were told that the other person had already sent a message, and the other half were told that they had no message waiting for them.
“You’re more attracted to someone when you’re sure of the response”
Afterwards, they were asked to rate how attractive the person they had chatted to was, and those who had received a reply from the person thought that person was more attractive than those who had not received a reply.
So anyone who plays hard to get runs the risk of repelling romantic partners.
