Flirting With Danger – Women Flirt To Avoid Conflict
Christopher Philip
To promote liability and reduce negative repercussions, women have been shown to employ non-sexually motivated flirtatious behaviours or “instrumental flirtation.” This is built on both verbal and nonverbal behaviours. Verbal flirting may consist of offering irrelevant to task personal information whereas nonverbal behaviours include smiling and leaning in.
The pitfall is double edged in that women, due to flirtation may signal sexual intent and invite unwanted sexual advances and men may misinterpret signals leading to unwanted charges of workplace (or other) sexual harassment.
Studies have shown that when women compete in areas that don’t fit their gender stereotype, they tend to disavow from flirtatiousness explicitly. They also forgo specific female traits such as nurturance. This has been shown when women compete in math and try to maintain a non-gendered “math-identity.” In such cases, women have verbally expressed their desire to disavow from flirtatiousness in a conscious way.
Thus, it would seem that while women have expressed wishes to avoid flirtation under such circumstances, no empirical evidence has been presented confirming that this actually takes place.
In other words, it has yet to be examined if women would actually reduce flirtatious behaviours when under perceived social threat or simply succumb to gender specific propensities.
The Current Studies
A team of researchers led by Avi Ben-Zeev, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, United States figured that while women might be successful in verbally reducing flirtatious behaviour, they may not be able to self-monitor the nonverbal cues to flirtatiousness under social threat.
Over two experiments the researchers predicted that stereotyped social threat where an interview conducted by a man would cause increased non-verbal, but not verbal flirtatious-consistent behaviours over an interview conducted where no social threat was present. With no threat present, the researchers predicted that the women would operate at or near their baseline levels which would promote social ease without being overtly sexual.
Video of the interview was coded by two independent raters for 18 behaviours including:
(a) nonverbal facial behaviors (smiling, downward glances, nods, raised eyebrows, touching/tossing one’s hair, touching one’s face);
(b) nonverbal bodily behaviors (adjusting/touching clothing, adjusting/touching peripheral accessories, headtilts, leaning forward, using animated hand gestures, crossing one’s legs); and finally (c) verbal behaviors (laughing, using humor, complimenting the interviewer, asking personal questions, offering irrelevant personal information, soliciting help).
Results showed that the mean (middle) frequency of nonverbal bodily behaviours was significantly higher under threat (17) than no threat (10). On the other hand, no verbal flirtatious behaviours were found between the two conditions as predicted.
In the second experiment, 8 videotaped interviewees were selected from the first experiment and shown to another group of male and female students. Clips were two minutes in length and muted. The participants were asked to make a simple assessment “This person was sexually interested in the interviewer” and rate it on a scale from 0-5 as well as a host of other filler questions.
Results showed that male participants, but not female, perceived sexual intent to be higher under threat than no threat. The female participants rated both conditions similarly.
Discussing The Findings
Interestingly, women exhibit flirtatious behaviour when under social threat. This has real world ramifications in that as threat is increased, nonverbal flirtation increases.
This creates a potential divergent situation whereby men are properly interpreting nonverbal cues, but they are not back by conscious sexual desire in the women emitting them.
It is interesting that verbal behaviours and nonverbal behaviours did not match. This suggests that verbal behaviours represent the ‘idealize self’ whereas nonverbal behaviours represent the underlying subconscious self.
The researchers are clear in that they wish not to be “adopting a Machiavellian lens of “blaming the victim,” in which women are seen as manipulative and therefore as “deserving of” repercussions.”
However, I would advance that in this case, it is women’s agency that is really at stake and if the “victim” doesn’t modify her behaviour she will not gain true agency over herself and gain the things she wishes in any active sense.
This notwithstanding, the outward effect on men, where they are influenced by flirty nonverbal signals actually produces a situation where women are affecting the perceptions of men motivating him into a status whereby he may be taken advantage of. In other words, through her flirting, his judgment of her becomes clouded and he becomes manipulated and thus – he potentially becomes the victim (being prosecuted for sexual harassment). We must be careful how we ascribe victim status as with all interactions, there are more than one way to view the situation.
Many a men have been taken advantage of through female flirting to his detriment.
Rather than lament the world we find ourselves immersed and blame men’s misinterpretation, it makes more sense for women to be more self focused on their nonverbal flirtatiousness should they not wish to appear flirtatious at all.
In this case, men were correct in their assessments – women did indeed, under social threat, flirt more, and thus signaling, rightfully or wrongfully, that they were sexually interested.
Drawing Conclusions
I contest that flirting is an adaptive strategy to gain sympathy when facing possibly difficult or threatening situations. It is likely that women have an evolutionary past which favoured those who flirted their way out of trouble making the process quite natural in modern life and business.
Women should rightfully be aware of their nonverbal behaviour to avoid appearing sexual in a business context (should they wish to) and not as the study authors present by modifying the world such that women may exibit whatever cues they wish without “objectification,” backlash or consequence.
I other words, if you flirt, people will see you as sexual – end of story.
Alternatively, and not specifically addressed in the study is whether or not the women actually flirted because they felt attraction to the interviewee due to his ability to produce social threat. It is well known that dominant men are better able to seduce women. Thus, by simply employing social context which made women feel awkward may actually evoke feelings of attraction. Likewise, the embodiment of flirting may produce feelings of attraction – ‘My body flirts, therefore I’m sexually attracted.’
Ultimately the world is a product of all the moving parts within it, it is up to us individually to change our own behaviour to reap the rewards we wish to achieve and not expect others to modify the landscape such that it becomes easier to navigate. This is real agency.
Resources
Ben-Zeev, Avi; Tara C. Dennehy; Rachel Sackman; Andres Olide and Christopher C. Berger. Flirting With Threat: Social Identity and the Perils of the Female Communality Prescription. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2019. 47: 1308-1311.