Week 2 Update

In starting observations for the Kinsey Reporter, the most obvious and important question to ask was: what is flirting and how do we classify what it is and isn’t? Thus, we looked at a report by Psychology Today which spoke about the various ways to spot someone flirting. Namely, the article highlighted nonverbal flirting cues (smiling, physical contact, etc) and verbal flirting cues (compliments, etc), which is mainly our bases for citing said behavior. With this in mind,

we began to record for Kinsey the data we found.

It’s no surprise that the most successful flirting happens in public places (out of public, park, and school), being that this provides the most ample opportunity for run-ins with strangers. On a bench along a busy street corner, a man sits next to a woman, complimenting her on her hairstyle. She reacts fairly well and they begin talking; she then flirts back, touching him lightly on the shoulder. Though no numbers were exchanged during the interaction, flirting back occurs 77% of the time whilst flirting in public places, according to the Kinsey Reporter. In a similar manner, the flirtee tends to flirt back 59% of the time when the initial flirting behavior is a compliment. Thus, this was no outstanding case of flirting but rather a correlated statistic consistent with the rest of the data.

In another case, a male teenager (~15 years old) approached a female teenager outside Midwood High School, also paying her compliments. However, the girl in this instance wasn’t very receptive, and rejected him outright. This is also consistent with existing data in the Kinsey Reporter, as people under 20 respond well to a compliment flirt only 7% of the time. In fact, with people under 20 the most common reaction to being flirted with is to walk away, tied with “bad feelings.” This is interesting, considering the most common place for people of this age group to flirt is a school area because that’s where the students are grouped with people their own age. One would think there would be a higher success rate, but unfortunately for the young male student, it doesn’t seem his romantic interest was very interested in him.

Stay tuned, folks; there are more updates to come!