Does Playing Hard To Get Really Work?
Back in the 60s and 70s, before the sexual revolution had really taken hold, the standard dating advice for women was play hard to get. In some quarters it still is.
Like the Roman poet Ovid 2,000 years earlier, “Easy things nobody wants, but what is forbidden is tempting.” Social scientists in the 1960s accepted the cultural lore that women could increase their desirability by being coy. When interviewed, men seemed to agree: they said that hard to get women were probably more popular, beautiful and had better personalities.
Unfortunately every time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense. At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties.
To find out what they did, and the interesting results they found, click here
How do you feel about these results? As this experiment suggests, playing hard to get only works in the sense that it signals selectivity. Do you agree?
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