This sounds to me like it goodharts on the wrong thing. When on a date your core concern isn’t to signal to the other person that you are flirting but that you are a desireable mate.
My take is that we’re trying to do both in equal measure, and that a big part of showing you’re a desirable mate is showing that you know how to flirt.
In fact, my gut feeling is that signaling that you’re interested/are flirting is more important. When meeting a stranger, there’s plenty of time to suss out their desirable qualities as time goes on. But if you fail to signal interest, you miss out on the opportunity to discover those desirable qualities entirely.
There are plenty of people who’d make excellent mates who fail to find relationships because they don’t know how to tell when somebody is interested in them. Likewise, there are people who are terrible mates but have no trouble finding relationships because they know how to tell when somebody’s interested in them.
From a male perspective a core way of expressing interest is to ask for a way to follow up and follow up.
From a female perspective signaling interest is more important, but engaging in actions believed by guys to be a show of interest is something different then engaging in actions from which a well-trained machine learning model can infer interest.
That’s not how the OP proposes this information to be used. All three paragraphs at the end that start bolded are recommending other ways to use the information.
It actually is how I was proposing this information could be used:
“This suggests that if you can get your partner to engage in their own natural flirting style, and get good at detecting it, then you can guess their intentions with much more confidence than the average person is capable of.“
If you get someone to interact in style X that’s normally a signal for Y it stops being a good signal for Y. That’s the basic Goodhard’s law principle.
It’s hard to be charming, rather than just doing a clumsy imitation of charm. If one person is overly practiced at being charming, they might be able to influence their partner’s behavior so that it’s no longer a reliable signal of their level of attraction. This fits with the Goodhart’s law interpretation.
Then again, it might be that in a romantic context, like speed dating, people are being careful to flirt only if they genuinely want to signal attraction. Flirting might even make the participants feel attracted to each other. This would work against Goodhart’s law.
My intuition is that the latter factors are more important than the former, though I do think it’s very possible for people to fall into clumsy imitations of charm, especially at first. But I have to assume that charm is a learned skill like just about everything else, so the clumsy attempts might be just an awkward phase.
This sounds to me like it goodharts on the wrong thing. When on a date your core concern isn’t to signal to the other person that you are flirting but that you are a desireable mate.
My take is that we’re trying to do both in equal measure, and that a big part of showing you’re a desirable mate is showing that you know how to flirt.
In fact, my gut feeling is that signaling that you’re interested/are flirting is more important. When meeting a stranger, there’s plenty of time to suss out their desirable qualities as time goes on. But if you fail to signal interest, you miss out on the opportunity to discover those desirable qualities entirely.
There are plenty of people who’d make excellent mates who fail to find relationships because they don’t know how to tell when somebody is interested in them. Likewise, there are people who are terrible mates but have no trouble finding relationships because they know how to tell when somebody’s interested in them.
From a male perspective a core way of expressing interest is to ask for a way to follow up and follow up.
From a female perspective signaling interest is more important, but engaging in actions believed by guys to be a show of interest is something different then engaging in actions from which a well-trained machine learning model can infer interest.
My primary use case for this would be at parties where whether or not someone is flirting is the core question.
That’s not how the OP proposes this information to be used. All three paragraphs at the end that start bolded are recommending other ways to use the information.
It actually is how I was proposing this information could be used:
“This suggests that if you can get your partner to engage in their own natural flirting style, and get good at detecting it, then you can guess their intentions with much more confidence than the average person is capable of.“
If you get someone to interact in style X that’s normally a signal for Y it stops being a good signal for Y. That’s the basic Goodhard’s law principle.
It’s hard to be charming, rather than just doing a clumsy imitation of charm. If one person is overly practiced at being charming, they might be able to influence their partner’s behavior so that it’s no longer a reliable signal of their level of attraction. This fits with the Goodhart’s law interpretation.
Then again, it might be that in a romantic context, like speed dating, people are being careful to flirt only if they genuinely want to signal attraction. Flirting might even make the participants feel attracted to each other. This would work against Goodhart’s law.
My intuition is that the latter factors are more important than the former, though I do think it’s very possible for people to fall into clumsy imitations of charm, especially at first. But I have to assume that charm is a learned skill like just about everything else, so the clumsy attempts might be just an awkward phase.
The study doesn’t measure people being charmed in the sense that they are perceived to be charming by other humans.