You walk into a party and spot a cutie talking to someone else. Are they friends? Siblings? Or a couple? According to a study published in the January issue of Psychological Science, you can suss out in just a few seconds of observation with fairly good accuracy whether your mark is fair game.
Skyler Place and collaborators showed clips of speed dates to men and women and asked the observers to judge whether each person on the date was interested in the other. Accuracy was judged based on whether the daters said they wanted a follow-up date. The videos were in a foreign language, so the main cures were voice and body language.
Male and female observers were equally accurate, but they were both better at judging male than female daters' interest. And observers were just as accurate after watching 10 seconds as after watching 30 seconds, but clips taken from the end of the 3-minute dates were most telling: with these late clips people correctly judged women's interest about 60% of the time and men's interest about 65% of the time. Presumably, if the relationship lasted longer than 3-minutes--as real-life relationships often do--observer accuracy would go even higher.
It makes sense that we would evolve to be able to read people's romantic intentions quickly. Accidental cock-blocking has surely gotten more than one caveman into trouble with his neighbor. It also makes sense that women would be better actors: They face greater risks of mating with the wrong person (single-parenting on the savannah), so their job is to be friendly and get the guy to open up so they can judge his true character. As a result, observers often overestimated women's interest during the dates. Some female daters were truly crafty; of the 24 women observed, the five most hard-to-read were misread 80% of the time. (Some men and women with their hearts on their sleeves were read correctly 90% of the time.)
Some observers had keener eyes than others. One trend the researchers noted: those in relationships had an edge. Perhaps the social skills required to keep someone around are the same ones used to read romantic interest. Or people with SOs at the time of the study are generally in relationships more and thus have more experience witnessing signs of interest. Of course there's one cue that even a cave dweller can read with near-100% accuracy: whether the finger has a ring on it.
If you've got 15 minutes, contribute to science by taking a version of the experiment here and let me know your score. My accuracy for judging both men and women was only 50%. But then I've only had two girlfriends in the last 12 years, so I'll just go back to my cave now.
Place, S., Todd, P., Penke, L., & Asendorpf, J. (2009). The Ability to Judge the Romantic Interest of Others Psychological Science, 20 (1), 22-26 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02248.x
