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ABSTRACT
This experiment examined women's impressions of men using various “pick-up” lines. Seventy women imagined being approached by a man using a flippant and flirtatious “pick-up” line, a direct complimentary line, or an innocuous line that masks his interest. His attractiveness varied too. They then considered him for long-term or short-term relationships. Matching a “good dad” hypothesis, they favored him for a long-term relationship if he used a direct or innocuous line instead of the flippant line, because the latter conveyed lower trustworthiness and intelligence. Matching a “good genes” hypothesis, they favored him for a short-term relationship if he was attractive instead of unattractive, regardless of his pick-up line, presumably because attractiveness signals heritable fitness. Limitations and theoretical implications are discussed.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Glenn Geher and Alexandra Freund for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and Hannah DeRobertis, Elizabeth Steo, Sean Wilson, and Sarah Wolfe for their assistance with data collection.
Notes
1. It is conceivable that some participants would define “attractiveness” in terms of personality instead of physical features. Yet this possibility seems remote because the scenario concerns a stranger at a campus event, and it would be disproved if the attractiveness manipulation has null effects on the trait attributions.
2. Answering the long-term relationship question could create pressure to remain consistent when answering the other two questions. For example, if participants reported relatively high willingness to consider a long-term relationship, then they might feel compelled to report equally high willingness to consider a conversation. This consistency pressure seemed less likely if the conversation item came first, as there is a large psychological gap between conversing and entering a relationship. We therefore presented the three questions to all participants in this order: conversation, short-term relationship, long-term relationship.
3. Our mediation results dovetail with Klienke and CitationDean's (1990) finding that flippant lines conveyed irresponsibility, selfishness, and promiscuity, all of which are cues to low trustworthiness (CitationFletcher et al., 1999). Both ours and theirs, however, depart somewhat from CitationCunningham's (1989) results, which showed that sociability not trustworthiness, was, along with intelligence, the principle trait that women consider when deciding whether to converse with the male line-user. This difference might trace to the choice of different flippant lines used in the studies: ours (“Shall we talk? Or continue flirting from a distance?”) and Kleinke and Dean's (e.g., “I'm easy, are you?”) are more sexual than Cunningham's (e.g., “Bet I can outdrink you”). Perhaps it is the flirtatious and sexual undertone, so common in flippant pick-up lines, that triggers apprehension about the man's intentions and trustworthiness, thus elevating its prominence in our findings.