The explanation below assumes that all women know what they're looking
for whereas no men know what women are looking for. Which isn't plaus...
hmmmm, wait, forget that remark.
I think we could differentiate between flirting as a way of garnering
information v flirting as a way of mitigating, as David says, the damage
caused by rejected advances by the pattern of flirting. In places where
relative strangers mingle (singles bars, say), I think the flirtation
tends to border on direct propositioning. But where friends or co-workers
interact, flirting is much more subtle. The latter type of environment is
the one in which garnering information about potential mates is relatively
unimportant (you already know them) whereas in the former information is
scant, so if flirting were mostly a way of signalling personal
characteristics we'd expect to see pattern reversed. This supports
David's variant on Robin's theme 1.
Chris Auld (403)220-4098
Economics, University of Calgary <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Calgary, Alberta, Canada <URL:http://jerry.ss.ucalgary.ca/>
On Mon, 27 Nov 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Robin Hanson's post was very interesting. I have wondered that ambiguous
> signals might play another role.
>
> Suppose all women like men who wear red ties because those men, for some
> reason, are nicer or richer than others. Assume that this is the only way
> women can tell the nice guys from the jerks(the men who are not nice). So
> women would avoid men who don't wear red ties. But if women told men that
> they like men who wear red ties, then the jerks(the men who are not nice)
> could wear red ties. If all men wore red ties, then women could not tell
> which guys were really nice. So you might not want to give away what signals
> you are looking for or what they mean. In your mating, dating, flirting
> activity you wuold not come right out and say what you are looking for.
>
> Cyril Morong
> San Antonio College
>
