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.
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.