Sex Myth 5 - Being smooth is the best way to pick someone up

Do you think that "Being smooth is the best way to pick someone up" is a myth ?

“I couldn’t help but notice that you look a lot like my next girlfriend.” This is an example of an unsmooth pickup line from the movie Hitch (2005), which is about a relationship consultant who helps men woo women. The line is said by David Wike’s character to Eva Mendes’ character. It doesn’t work. Then, Will Smith’s character comes in to rescue her from the unsolicited interaction by using some smooth lines of his own. Of course, women are also able to be smooth, such as when Ingrid Bergman’s character says to Humphrey Bogart’s character in the movie Casablanca (1942): “Was that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?” So, the question behind this myth is whether being smooth – as Will Smith’s character tries to teach hapless men, such as Kevin James’ character, to be – is the best way to initiate an interaction with someone in whom you are interested. Alternatively, would a line like the one uttered by Russell Crowe’s character to Jennifer Connelly’s character in A Beautiful Mind (2001) be the better way to go? Here is his line: “I don’t exactly know what I am required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me. But, could we assume that I said all that. I mean essentially we’re talking about fluid exchange right? So, could we go just straight to the sex?” The answer to this question is almost always no, but this fact has not stopped people from looking for shortcuts. Books on how to find and land a partner, whether it’s for a few hours or for a lifetime, have spent many weeks on the best‐seller list. For example, The Rules: Time‐Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (Fein & Schneider, 1995), which gave women advice about dating, sold over 2 million copies in 27 languages (Witchel, 2001). This was followed up by the best‐selling Rules of the Game (Strauss, 2007), which did the same for men. The success of these and other books has led to an entire industry of seduction gurus and dating coaches (Swarns, 2012; Yuan, 2013) and even led to a VH1 television series called The Pickup Artist. The demand for advice on meeting and seducing others means that people want to know one thing: “What’s the secret?” To answer this question, let’s begin by simply reviewing the process of meeting potential mates.

Making the first move

As Russell Crowe’s character figured out, certain steps cannot be skipped, meaning that he couldn’t “go just straight to the sex.” As with humans, animals must also follow certain steps if they are to reproduce. There are some steps that are nearly universal across animals and humans prior to intercourse. For all primates (our closest relatives in the animal kingdom), three behaviors are essential to making the first moves (Eibl‐ Eibesfeldt, 1979). The animal must do something to announce its presence to potential mates. The animal must make its sex evident. Finally, the animal must indicate its availability and willingness to have sex. Even well beyond primates, these are behaviors that are deemed essential to most animals. But, do they apply to humans? David Givens (1978, 1983) set out to answer this question by examining humans in the places where they go to select mates (their natural habitat, if you will). He went to bars where people went to meet others. In the 1970s these were called singles bars, but – depending on your age – you might know them as dance halls, discotheques, or nightclubs. While observing humans in this habitat, Givens noticed the same three behaviors. Showing up was necessary. This point is so obvious, I will let the lyrics from the Tony‐award‐winning musical Avenue Q (2003) make the point:

There is life outside your apartment. I know it’s hard to conceive. But there’s life outside your apartment. And you’re only gonna see it if you leave. There is cool shit to do, But it can’t come to you, And who knows, dude You might even score!

Beyond simply showing up, Givens noticed that people announced their presence by bumping into others or speaking loudly. In addition, he noticed that their behaviors seemed designed to emphasize their gender, meaning that the men acted more masculine and the women more feminine than in other settings. These two behaviors are, of course, necessary but not sufficient. The third step involves sending a signal that you are interested in a particular person. It’s generally thought that men make the first move and that women sit back and await their potential partners to offer themselves. However, there are many animal species in which females approach males for sexual purposes (for a review, see Wallen, 1995). As with animal models, women in singles bars tend to be the first to indicate their receptiveness to particular men (Cary, 1976; de Weerth & Kalma, 1995; Kendon, 1975; Kendon, Harris, & Key, 1975; McCormick & Jones, 1989; Perper & Weis, 1987). The term for the subtle behaviors that comprise women’s first moves that indicate a willingness to be approached, for example briefly making eye contact, is proceptivity (Perper, 1989). Proceptivity allows a woman to initiate contact while maintaining plausible deniability and acting as if she’s hard to get (see side box). The problem with the subtle nature of proceptivity is that it can be misperceived or missed. For example, a partial smile from someone might mean that that person is open to being approached or that he or she is trying to hide a burp. On the receiving end, proceptive behaviors.

BONUS MYTH READ

Women should play “hard to get” - Women are often told that they should “play hard to get” in order to be found more attractive to men and in order to find a more desirable man. So common is this advice that “Socrates, Ovid, Terence, the Kama Sutra, and Dear Abby all agree that the person whose affection is easily won is unlikely to inspire passion in another” (Walster, Walster, Piliavin, & Schmidt, 1973, p. 113). To determine whether this is good advice, let’s go back to the first empirical article (that I could find) on this subject. Elaine Walster, G. William Walster, and Ellen Berscheid (1971) tested the effectiveness of playing hard to get in two studies with adolescents. In their studies, they paid high school students $2 each to rate the social desirability of two people. The participants saw a picture of both people and read a description of them. The key variable that was changed was that sometimes the description ended by describing one of the people as either very interested, very disinterested, or having unknown interest in the other person described (they provided no information about how the other person felt). Being good scientists, the experimenters included descriptions and pictures of both attractive and unattractive people so they could check their manipulations. If the advice to play hard to get was correct, the high school students should have rated the disinterested people as more socially desirable. However, in the first study, there was no statistically significant difference and, in the second study, the people who were interested in the other person were rated as more socially desirable. This is the opposite of the outcome that would occur if playing hard to get were good advice. Following up this study, Elaine Walster, G. William Walster, Jane Piliavin, and Lynn Schmidt (1973) did five more experiments – this time with college students – that replicated the findings of the previous article. In each of these experiments, there was no support for the hypothesis that playing hard to get made someone more desirable. Happily, they didn’t leave it alone at that point. They conducted a sixth experiment in which they manipulated how hard to get a woman was for the participant and how hard to get she was for other men. It turns out that women who were portrayed as easy for the participant to get but hard for other men to get were viewed as the most desirable. But, it gets better. Consider both the assets and liabilities of women who are generally hard to get and women who are easy to get. Men seemed to think the women who were easy for them and hard for others to get had all of the positive qualities of both generally hard‐to‐get and generally easy‐to‐get women, while none of the negative qualities. Charlene L. Muehlenhard and Richard M. McFall (1981) took a slightly different approach. They asked 106 college men to think of four different women: one whom they wanted to date, one whom they liked as a person, one about whom they felt indifferent, and one whom they disliked. For each of these women, the men were asked what their reactions and behaviors would be if the woman did one of the following: directly asked him for a date, hinted about going out (e.g., telling him about a movie she wanted to see or letting him know that she had no weekend plans), or did nothing (in other words waited for him to ask her out). Almost all of what determined men’s reactions was how they felt about her. So, there appeared to be no benefit to playing hard to get; in fact there was some cost because a sizable portion (30%) of the men indicated that, if a woman he was interested in did nothing, he would take that as a sign that she was not interested in him. To summarize, it seems that there’s a great deal of support for women not to play hard to get with a man in whom they are interested. However, they are wise to appear to be hard to get for other men. For an accounting of some of these benefits, see Jonason and Li (2013). Their data make it clear that there are benefits to women who appear to be hard to get. For example, they note that men will probably take them to a more expensive restaurant. In any case, ladies, there’s no reason to play hard to get with a specific man you want to get!

...continue before bonus - can be missed completely or over‐interpreted. In one study, only 36% of men and 18% of women accurately detected when someone was flirting with them (Hall, Xing, & Brooks, 2014). The sender versus receiver distinction is important because receivers tend to infer more specificity and rejection than senders mean to imply when it comes to nonverbal communication (Fichten, Tagalakis, Judd, Wright, & Amsel, 1992). Such is the nature of subtle communication, and the bad news is that these problems continue through courtship and marriage (see Myth 16: Good communication is the key to a happy relationship). This problem is compounded by a sex difference in which men tend to view interactions between men and women as having more sexual tension than women (Abbey & Melby, 1986; cf. Perilloux & Kurzban, 2014). Nevertheless, there are multiple studies that suggest that in heterosexual venues, men need quite a bit of encouragement before they risk approaching a woman. While being observed in singles bars, men tend to approach women only after repeated eye contact followed by smiling (Walsh & Hewitt, 1985; see also Perper, 1985). For a review of this line of research, see Moore (2010).

The challenge of initiating interaction

Once proceptivity has been perceived (or even if it has not been), someone has to make the first move to actually initiate conversation. Some have referred to these initial moves toward conversation as “opening gambits” (e.g., M. R. Cunningham, 1989). The use of the term “gambit” is telling because the word refers to move in chess in which one player offers a sacrifice of material (usually a pawn but sometimes a piece of greater value) to the opponent in the hope that the sacrifice of the piece will lead to a more advantageous position. As in singles bars, gambits in chess can either be accepted (meaning the opponent took the offered material) or declined (meaning the opponent didn’t take the material). In chess, declining a gambit can either be done by offering a different gambit or by fortifying a defense. This imperfect analogy can be applied to opening lines between potential mates. If, for example, a man approaches a woman and offers to buy her a drink, she may accept with the knowledge that he may be looking to put himself in an advantageous position later. She may decline but offer to buy him one or invite him to sit down (offering her time and attention to him in a counter gambit). She may decline while turning to a friend, thereby strengthening her position that she’s not interested and not alone. In any case, the opening gambit requires a willingness to sacrifice – time, money, or ego – in the hope that it pays off. As such, opening gambits require a certain amount of self‐ esteem or – barring that – a situation that precludes social risk (Cameron, Stinson, & Wood, 2013).

This is where the question of being “smooth” comes into play. While it’s not clear that everyone would agree on the definition of “a smooth operator,” most would agree that we’re talking about someone who is suave. In other words, someone who makes the gambit seem natural.  However, this is still not specific enough for scientific study. It’s easier to study variables when they are isolated, so, to examine this myth, I have broken the idea of a person being “smooth” into nonverbal and verbal components.

Nonverbal smoothness

How people walk, how they use touch, and how they use eye contact are all behaviors that contribute to their perceived attractiveness. In the movie Hitch, Will Smith’s character spends a great deal of his time coaching Kevin James’ character in the art of nonverbal behavior. For example, on kissing, he says “the secret is to go 90% of the way and hold,” going on to indicate that she will come the last 10% of the way. So, does this sort of behavior matter? The data are mixed on the degree to which being nonverbally “smooth” matters. One way to be smooth is to subtly mimic the movements of the other person. This is called behavioral synchrony, and it’s usually a behavior that two people who like each other and are having a pleasing interaction do without thinking about it (Crown, 1991; Grammer, 1990). These types of nonverbal behaviors go both ways as well. To understand the nonverbal behaviors that women use to express their interest in a particular man during initial conversations, researchers had college students watch video tapes of a man and a woman having a conversation in a public place and asked them about the likelihood of the woman accepting the man’s invitation to go out based on her behavior. They were able to identify the following nonverbal behaviors that indicate interest in a man (Muehlenhard, Koralewski, Andrews, & Burdick, 1986, p. 413):

• Eye contact 

• Smiling 

• Leaning toward him

 • Shoulders oriented toward him 

• Being around 18 inches apart 

• Touching while laughing 

• Touching while not laughing 

• Catching his eye while laughing at someone else’s humor 

• Attentiveness 

Ŋ She stops what she’s doing. 

Ŋ She doesn’t look around. 

Ŋ She doesn’t look at other men.

• Avoiding public grooming 

• Using animated speech

You will notice that I have listed some complex nonverbal behaviors. This is a lot to keep track of, and we’ve not even started thinking about what to actually say. Of course, most people do these things without consciously thinking about them. In fact, when we do start to think about them they can come off as awkward or forced. So, if someone can perform all of these nonverbal behaviors at the right time and in the proper proportion, we might call that person “a smooth operator” or simply “socially skilled.”

Verbal smoothness

Michael Cunningham (1989) examined how different opening gambits work with members of the other sex (it’s unclear whether his research will extend to opening lines on members of the same sex; see Myth 12: There are no differences between same‐sex and heterosexual relationships). In a series of studies, he divided opening lines into three categories based on previous work examining preferences for opening lines (Kleinke, Meeker, & Staneski, 1986): direct, innocuous, and flippant (i.e., cute). In one of these experiments Cunningham went to three bars in suburban Chicago and had a White man of “medium attractiveness” (1989, p. 29) approach 63 different women using one of six lines. Four lines (two direct and two innocuous lines) were rated very highly in prior research by Kleinke and colleagues, and two were rated near the bottom (two flippant lines). The male experimenter was not told of the hypotheses and was instructed to deliver the lines earnestly. The women were selected at random (as long as they were not with a man and not deeply involved in conversation) and the line to be delivered was randomly assigned. The responses of the women were rated using both verbal and nonverbal cues (e.g., maintaining eye contact or looking away). The raters were 93% consistent in their positive versus negative ratings. The results? In the end, women reacted more positively to the direct and innocuous lines compared to the flippant lines. Specifically, each of the lines and the percent of women who reacted positively are shown in Figure 5. Cunningham did another experiment with both men and women being approached (always by an experimenter of the other sex), with similar results for women. The men, however, reacted positively to essentially all of the approaches (this is called a ceiling effect), which made it difficult to draw very many conclusions other than that men aren’t very discriminating when it comes to opening lines. Therefore, it seems that if your definition of smooth is one who uses flippant or cute lines, the smooth operators lose big time; however, if your definition of smooth is someone who uses direct or innocuous lines, then smooth  men do well. Women it seems can use nearly any opening gambit on men. Perhaps you are wondering if the most important part of being smooth might be neither what was said nor how it was said, but rather in wearing down the target of your desire. In other words, might it be the case that persistence is the key to being smooth. For example, is it possible to wear down someone to the point that they simply say yes? Using the same three categories of opening gambits, researchers set out to see if women’s responses would change if they were mentally worn out. This is a concept that researchers call ego‐depletion, meaning that self‐regulation diminishes after an extended period of self‐ control (e.g., working when you would rather be playing) or mental work (e.g., decision‐making or difficult mental tasks). So, in theory, maybe smooth operators can pick out the women who have worn out their self‐control mechanism and move in – even with a flippant line that rarely works. Nope. It turns out that women are even less interested in flippant lines when they are ego‐depleted, thus less likely to hide their contempt for such lines. There were no differences for direct or innocuous opening gambits (Lewandowski, Ciarocco, Pettenato, & Stephan, 2012).

Being smooth is not everything

Alright, so the data on being smooth are far from clear. Let’s look at the question from another angle. Are there other factors that can improve your chances of winning the heart of that special someone who may or may not even know you exist? Here, I am happy to report, I have some good news even for the decidedly unsmooth. There are other effects that are more likely to influence the receptiveness of your potential sweetheart than how smooth you are during your opening gambit. Here are a few examples.

The mere exposure effect We, as humans, tend to like what is familiar to us (Zajonc, 1968). For example, the more you hear a song played on the radio, the more you will like it. The more you use a certain type of product, the more you will like it. There are certainly exceptions, but this outcome is one of the fundamental findings of psychology. It has implications for many aspects of our lives and has been applied to a great many other areas of research from prejudice to memory (e.g., Bornstein & D’Agostino, 1994; Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004; Westerman, 2008). The term for our liking of the familiar is the mere exposure effect, as in one merely has to be exposed to something more to elicit more positive feelings about it (for a review, see Garcia‐Marques, Mackie, Claypool, & Garcia‐Marques, 2013). As you can imagine, knowledge of this effect may also be applied to intimate relationships. I often tell my students that if they are interested in someone, they should start exposing themselves to that person more. Wait, that didn’t come out right! I mean they should endeavor to be seen by them more. So, I tell my students that they might take the same classes or go to the cafeteria at the same time as their would‐be lover. Simply running into the person more (i.e., exposing yourself more – with your clothes on) will increase the person’s feelings of positive regard for you. When I mention this to students, they usually follow up with a question along the lines of “isn’t that considered stalking?” Yes, if the person has indicated disinterest and you continue to show up, you are stalking. Aside from disrespecting the wishes and rights of this person to not be around you, it is likely that your attempts will become an annoyance. Furthermore, as we just learned, if the object of your desire is not interested in you, her or his exercise and depletion of self‐control will reduce the likelihood of a positive response to your continued presence. In other words, there really is a line at which it becomes stalking and, therefore, irritating and counterproductive (and possibly illegal). And, this line can be found by believing and accepting another person’s disinterest in your company.

The influence of proximity One predictor of people we fall in love with is whether they are physically close to us. Part of this is likely related to the mere exposure effect, but logically it simply makes sense. You are more likely to fall for someone you know than someone you don’t know, and you are more likely to know people who live and work near you (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950). In other words, even if your perfect soulmate is out there, you probably won’t end up together if she or he lives in a small village in Tibet while you live in suburban St. Louis. Of course, this is an extreme example, but the influence of proximity has been repeatedly demonstrated as an important predictor of who gets together (Ebbesen, Kjos, & Konecni, 1976). So, practically speaking, this means that it’s less likely you will find a good match if you don’t interact with other people

The pratfall effect Finally, there are data that suggest that the opposite of being smooth is attractive. In a clever demonstration of this, experimenters set up a fake trivia game show. The participants listened to fake audiotapes of people supposedly trying out for the show and rated how attracted they were to each of the contestants. The first contestant got most of the answers wrong and came off as uninteresting and unaccomplished, the second got most of the answers correct and came off as interesting and accomplished, the third was like the first (uninteresting, unaccomplished, and often wrong) but spilled a drink at the end, and the fourth was like the second (interesting, accomplished, and mostly correct) but also spilled a drink. Again, the question for the participants in the study was whom did they find most attractive? The winner was contestant four who was interesting, accomplished, and mostly correct, but who spilled a drink (Aronson, Willerman, & Floyd, 1966). This would be the opposite of smooth. So, it would seem that the most attractive person would be the one who has a lot of positive features, but who is decidedly not smooth. In other words, people tend to be attracted to near perfection rather than perfection. Being clumsy or prone to pratfalls is an easily dismissed – or even desired – imperfection.

Conclusion

In the end, people probably have different definitions of smooth. However, a few things seem clear. In order to meet the right person, one has to go out at some point and make it somewhat clear that one is available. When it comes to initiating conversation, having social skills is a good thing (notice the word skills – meaning these can be learned, practiced, and improved). In addition, being direct or innocuous is much better than being cute or flippant (at least for men trying to meet women). Finally, putting too much effort on being smooth may come off as inauthentic and – worse still – may mean that you’re concealing an adorable clumsiness.