The best way to flirt according to science

«Courtship involves various signals that people send to each other. It is done to attract potential mates. Both men and women flirt to attract the attention of a desirable partner and perhaps to achieve a sexual or romantic outcome from it,» says Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, a professor at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

As T. Joel Wade, professor of psychology at Bucknell University, USA, adds, «flirting can be verbal and non-verbal».

If you didn't know, flirting has its unwritten rules too. Researchers have found that there are some practices that maximize the chances of a successful courtship.

Humour: the most powerful «card» in courtship

The research was conducted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Bucknell University of Pennsylvania, and the State University of New York and published in Evolutionary Psychology. It was conducted on 1,000 volunteers in Norway and the United States. The researchers' goal was to study how effective people thought the various courtship attempts were.

Specifically, participants rated 40 different types of courtship as to how effective they were in attracting a person to a long-term or short-term relationship. Among other things, what they found was that while we believe that the success of courtship is probably due to how perfectly the person meets cultural standards of beauty, this was not the case at all.

«The individual differences in Age, the religiosity, the extroversion, the Attractiveness and the preferences for short-term sexual relationships had little or no effect on how effective the respondents found the various courtship tactics to be,» Mons Bendixen, professor of psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-author of the study, told EurekAlert. In other words, effective flirting has no apparent connection to attractiveness, clinically speaking.

As the study showed, what makes flirting more effective is the humour. According to researchers, people believe that being able to make another person laugh is more effective for men with a sense of humor who are looking for a long-term relationship. It's less effective, however, for women looking for a one-night stand. But laughing or giggling at each other's jokes is an effective flirting tactic for both sexes.

As the researchers noted, though, no one courtship strategy worked perfectly for everyone, the humour seemed to be at least somewhat effective in most cases.

And if you don't have a sense of humor, don't despair. The researchers reported that «smile and eye contact are also important. Then you can build your flirting skills from that base, using more advanced tactics,» Kennair told EurekAlert.