Science of Sexy: 5 Things That Can Make You Irresistible

Recent research suggests that while both men and women say they like a “good sense of humor” in a potential mate, they differ in what they mean by this phrase. Women tend to prefer men who make them laugh, whereas men tend to prefer women who laugh at their jokes.

Consistent with this, Robert Provine analyzed more than 3000 singles ads and found that women were more likely to describe their good humor appreciation ability whereas men were more likely to offer good humor production ability.

Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller found in a sample of 400 university students that general intelligence and verbal intelligence both predicted humor production ability (writing captions for cartoons), which in turn predicted lifetime number of sexual partners (a proxy of reproductive success). They found, however, that males showed higher average levels of humor production ability, which is consistent with the sexual selection perspective. From these results, Greengross argues that a sense of humor evolved at least partly through sexual selection as an intelligence indicator.

Men in the “humor” condition received phone numbers from 42.9% of the female participants and were refused 57.1% of the time. In comparison, men in the “no humor” condition were refused 84.6% of the time and were only accepted 15.4% of the time. In other words, men who were observed as the humor producers of the group were nearly three times as likely to receive a phone number than those who were observed as laughing at a friend’s joke instead.

Dr. Aron affirmed that the subjects’ expectation that the other person was going to like them had a huge effect. “If you ask people about their experience of falling in love, over 90 percent will say that a major factor was discovering that the other person liked them,” according to Dr. Aron.

As a result of the interviews, the researchers speculated that the best strategy would be to give a potential date the impression that in general you were hard to get (and therefore a scarce resource worth having) but really enthusiastic about him or her specifically. They tested this notion by using some of the same techniques… and found overwhelming evidence to support their hypothesis.

Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is interested in how people form romantic relationships, and he’s come up with an ingenious way of taking men and women who have never met before and making them feel close to one another. Given that he has just an hour or so to create the intimacy levels that typically take weeks, months, or years to form, he accelerated the getting-to-know-you process through a set of thirty-six questions crafted to take the participants rapidly from level one in McAdams’s system to level two.

What he found was striking. The intensity of the dialogue partners’ bond at the end of the forty-five-minute vulnerability interaction was rated as closer than the closest relationship in the lives of 30 percent of similar students. In other words, the instant connections were more powerful than many long-term, even lifelong relationships.

When women are looking for a short-term fling, however, it may be a different story. One study conducted on college students found that women favored men for a short-term fling if they found the men attractive regardless of the content of their pickup lines.

Nettle and Clegg reported that in a sample of 545 people, men (but not women) with low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness tended to have a higher number of sexual partners. It has also been found cross-culturally, across 10 world regions, that low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness are related to higher levels of sexual promiscuity and relationship infidelity, so there may be reproductive benefits to those on the low end of these traits.

Those in the high-fear condition did show, for example, significantly more desire to kiss my confederate (one of the key questions) and wrote more romantic and sexual content into their stories. Looking at the details of these results, I found that the situation had generated, quite specifically, romantic attraction.

…if partners experience excitement from other sources (such as novel and challenging activities) in a shared context, this shared experience can reignite relationship passion by associating the excitement with the relationship.

Dr. Earl Naumann, author of Love at First Sight, interviewed and surveyed 1500 individuals of all races, religions, and backgrounds across America, and concluded that love at first sight is not a rare experience. What’s more, Dr. Naumann theorizes that if you believe in love at first sight, there’s a roughly 60 percent chance it will happen to you. Here’s what led him to that conclusion.

1. Nearly two thirds of the population believes in love at first sight.
2. Of the believers, more than half have experienced it.
3. Fifty-five percent of those who experienced it married the object of their affection.
4. Three quarters of these married couples stayed married.