Playing Hard-To-Get Can Pay Off

Study Confirms: Playing Hard-To-Get Can Pay Off

Every parents’ advice for their daughter to play hard-to-get actually does have scientific backing, reports NBC News.
Pretending to be the least bit interested in a potential mate to increase your desirability has now gained scientific support. The new study says that if you want to be involved in a serious relationship, it is good for men and women to play hard-to-get. Even if you’re not.
A benefit of playing hard-to-get could be attracting a higher-quality partner who can commit to a relationship, said the study.
The new study was published in the European Journal of Personality. In the study, psychology researchers conducted four different experiments to see how and why people play hard-to-get, and if or when it works in attracting a potential partner.
In one of the tests, researchers looked for the ways people play hard-to-get and how often the different sexes use them. “Acting confident” and “talking to others” was rated as the two most commonly used methods of playing hard-to-get from a list of 58 strategies that almost 500 American college students rated.
Men and women are different, so naturally there was a change in strategies. When women acted uninterested, and tended “not to call,” “not to talk a lot,” and ”to stay busy,” more than men did.
When men acted uninterested, they used three methods more than women did such as ”acting snooty or rude,” ”saying all the right things but not calling,” and ”treating others like s#@t.” This sounds about right.
In their findings, researchers noticed that women played hard-to-get more often than men.
The study author Peter Jonason, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, said:

“Women derive more benefit from playing hard-to-get because it allows them to test men out and increase the demand men place on them.”

“Because women have greater value in the biological mating market, they can afford to play hard-to-get more than men can,” said Jonason. “Men who are too hard-to-get may miss out on a mating opportunity.”
The study shows that for a committed romantic relationship, women preferred a man who was not too easy or too hard-to-get. Men preferred a woman to be harder to get.
“We all would want honesty in dating but this is never going to happen,” said Jonason. “We are not overtly lying, but we’re always trying to marry up.”
Researchers said that their study only looked at college age students, so their results could vary among other age groups of single people.
Nevertheless, the findings did give some insight into playing hard-to-get.