Chat-up lines as male sexual displays

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Abstract

Chat-up lines, and other openings used to initiate a relationship with a woman, can be viewed as male displays. How well does their effectiveness accord with predictions from evolutionary psychology? 205 undergraduates (142 female, 63 male) rated 40 vignettes; in each vignette, a man approached a woman and the raters judged whether she would continue the conversation. Openings involving jokes, empty compliments and sexual references received poor ratings. Those revealing, e.g., helpfulness, generosity, athleticism, ‘culture’ and wealth, were highly rated. Although the length of the vignette—confounded here with item content—affected the rating, differences remained after the effects of length were eliminated. The success of openings which demonstrated culture was predicted from Miller’s (2000) ‘mating mind’ hypothesis; the success of others could be predicted from patterns of parental investment.

Introduction

Do the first words matter, when a man attempts to strike up a relationship with a woman? Rather than just breaking the ice, his opening remarks may act as a sexual display that allows her to discern qualities that will make him interesting as a long- or short-term partner. Effective opening gambits should therefore show off the attractive qualities predicted by evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Buss, 1989, Buss, 1999, Miller, 2000).

Sexual strategies theory (Buss & Schmitt, 1993) relates differences in the qualities men and women value in a mate to the different problems faced by the sexes over evolutionary time. Men attend particularly to a woman’s fidelity, her appearance, and to other cues predicting her fertility (reviewed in Barrett et al., 2002, Buss, 1999). Women look particularly for resources, wealth or earning potential in a long-term partner (Buss, 1989). For shorter relationships the relative importance of different criteria changes (Buss and Schmitt, 1993, Kenrick et al., 1990) and the effectiveness of some cues, for women, even varies across the menstrual cycle suggesting that the optimal balance between partner-traits is related to the probability of conception (Gangestad et al., 2004, Gangestad and Thornhill, 1998, Penton-Voak and Perrett, 2001).

Men and women have similar problems in mate choice: both sexes will invest substantially in their partnership and in rearing the children, so both should look for signals that a potential partner is fertile and will contribute good genes, and make a good parent and a compatible partner. The signals used to identify a high-quality mate must be difficult for lower-quality individuals to fake, and intelligence has this characteristic. Miller (2000) likened the runaway evolution of the human brain and intellect to the evolution of showy male characters such as the peacock’s tail. His ‘mating mind’ hypothesis suggests that human intelligence and creativity (and humour, art and music, etc.) has evolved through sexual rather than natural selection to provide honest signals of general fitness. In animals, honest signalling (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997) is involved in mate choice. For example, differences in quality of males (‘good genes’) can be linked to differences in their developmental stability and to variation in the symmetry of the adult animal; symmetrical males (individuals with low ‘fluctuating asymmetry’) are more attractive to females, and their offspring have greater fitness (Møller & Swaddle, 1997). In humans, fluctuating asymmetry (FA) differences also occur. Low FA correlates with differences in specific aspects of performance (Jung et al., 2000, Rahman et al., 2004) and with higher general intelligence (Furlow et al., 1997, Prokosch et al., 2005), and so a man’s ability to manage the conversation when trying to pick up a woman might provide her with information about this aspect of genetic quality. In this context, non-verbal signals from the woman both permit or inhibit the man’s initial approach (Grammer, 1989) and modulate his subsequent self-presentation (Grammer, Kruk, Juette, & Fink, 2000): what he says could display his potential as a mate (Miller, 2000), rather than just serving to establish the relationship.

The aim of our study was to construct a pencil and paper instrument to index the effectiveness of chat-up lines and other opening gambits collected from a variety of sources, and to account in evolutionary terms for differences in effectiveness, including particularly those involving cues identified by Miller (2000) as signals of fitness. The qualities that will influence responses to a potential partner include (Feingold, 1993): physical attractiveness, SES, intelligence, character (honesty, sincerity), personality (charisma, expressiveness) and sense of humour. We assembled vignettes in which a man tried to pick up a woman in a social setting, predicting that women would be attracted to opening gambits which advertised the man’s wealth and other positive attributes (e.g. high status, good physical condition, generosity) and showed willingness to invest in a partner. Taking Miller’s suggestions into account, we included vignettes showing the man’s intelligence, wit, and the culturally-valued talents that he possessed, all of which could indicate his fitness, and we expected women to be attracted to these qualities. We added vignettes exemplifying the themes that dominate compendiums of ‘chat-up lines’: sexual innuendo, jokes, and compliments.

Section snippets

Methods

In our study population it was usual for men to approach women rather than vice versa; women reported that when a man interested them they would make use of eye contact or a smile, etc., to try to solicit his approach. Forty vignettes were constructed in which a male protagonist attempted to start a conversation with a woman: a short introduction to set the scene was followed by dialogue between the man and woman. The vignettes were derived from various sources: four (coded C in Table 1) were

Results

The opening gambits differed in their predicted success in leading to further conversation (Table 1). Highly-rated items included those reflecting the man’s helpfulness (items 24, 34), ability to take control of a situation (34), wealth (4) education or culture (8, 31), and spontaneous wit (12). The direct request for sex (29) received a low score, but it was not the least effective gambit. Openings involving sexually-based humour (e.g., 7, 15, 39) were rated as likely to be unsuccessful, as

Discussion

To our knowledge, this is the first study of the verbal aspects of courtship-initiation behaviour. The high Cronbach Alpha, which indicated good agreement among raters about relative effectiveness of the opening gambits in the questionnaire, supports our vignette-based technique. However, our stimuli were collated from a range of sources, and our analyses suggested additional controls that could in future be introduced in stimulus construction. The differences in content among our vignettes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to an anonymous referee for several valuable suggestions which have been incorporated in the introduction and discussion.

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    1

    Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, Lancashire, UK.

    2

    Joint first authors in alphabetical order.

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