Week 4 Update

Many people find flirting to be a scary, ambiguous, and inimitable activity. While executing our project, we have definitely learned that flirting is a very, very broad and overarching term. When something encompasses such variety, it should not come as a shock that it is spurred by several different reasons. There are different motivations for flirting, the main ones being for sex, fun, explorative, relational, esteem, and instrumental purposes

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Interestingly, studies have found that different locations greatly impact the motivation and seriousness for flirting. The locations in question were a school environment and a workplace. Students were much more likely to say that their flirting was sexually motivated than were workers. The theory that explains this is called the Cognitive Valence Theory, which states, “the context of the workplace may invoke relational or situational schemas that inhibit the likelihood of interpreting ambiguous communication as sexually motivated”. So since workers know that flirting in their workplace is frowned upon, they are less likely to jump to conclusions that vague behaviors indicate sexual interest. Universities, on the other hand, are different. While education is supposed to be the number one priority in universities, finding a suitable partner is definitely not far behind. Love and sex, whether they’re one and the same, mutually exclusive, or anything in between, is bound to be on the minds of students when you have thousands of young, healthy, evolutionarily driven individuals all on the same plot of land. Thus, students are also more likely to report that they flirt as means of pursuing a relationship than are workers, who are more likely to report that they simply flirt as a situational behavior or norm. Students flirt because they are interested in furthering an association whereas workers flirt because that is the daily coffee-run ritual.

One of the studies also states “message explicitness increases the likelihood that a behavior will be considered sexual harassment. Flirting behaviors tend to have low message explicitness. Behaviors such as smiling, laughing, and nodding have been identified as flirting behaviors and yet do not denote any specific sexual desire”. Flirting behaviors are characteristically vague and a social trend that scientists have picked up on is that men typically perceive these vague, non-sexual gestures as much more sexual than do women. This helps explain why women around the world, from all cultural backgrounds, are warned against being overly friendly with men as opposed to vice versa.