Interpreting Flirting Signals and Decision-Making

14min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The chapter delves into various experiments and studies related to the interpretation of flirting signals, decision-making under arousal, and facial expressions. Discussions cover topics such as how men interpret cues from women's attire and expressions, reactions to erotic fiction, and the impact of sexual arousal on cognitive processes. Experiments involving participants choosing flirtatious individuals and measuring decision-making times based on sexual stimuli are explored, along with debates on interpreting facial expressions like flirty smiles.

A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads “The first letter of the name has been written.” The celebrated detective and “reasoning machine” Erik Lönnrot suspects a rabbinical explanation but is he seeing patterns that may not be there? David and Tamler get out their pipes, magnifying glasses, and deerstalker hats to unravel another Borges mystery: “Death and the Compass.” Plus a new study on why men make errors about whether women are flirting with them, the latest in our series on studies that employ erotic fiction.

Links:

A Dress Is Not a Yes: Towards an Indirect Mouse-Tracking Measure of Men’s Overreliance on Global Cues in the Context of Sexual Flirting

Pinpointing the psychological factors linked to men's misjudgments of women's sexual interest

Death and the Compass by Jorge Luis Borges [wikipedia.org]