They’re Totally Checking Me Out!
You are in a bar with your friend. It’s singles night. You’re both looking for that someone right for you, or perhaps for you right now. Through the crowd, you catch someone’s eye across the room. You notice them looking at you and spot that they are running a hand through their hair. They look away, then look back at you again, still with the hand tousling the hair. You’ve heard that if someone is looking at you with their hand in their hair it for sure means they think you are hot and are flirting with you. You turn to your friend and announce, “I am totally getting checked out!”
HAVE YOU BEEN THERE BEFORE? How right or wrong were you in that moment? How can you evaluate the truth and lies about whether you are being checked out? Before you make your move, take a moment to go through the easy-to-follow steps below, to critically think through what body language is telling you about the situation.
LET’S APPLY OUR CRITICAL THINKING SCAN MODEL TO THIS SCENARIO, FIRST WITH STEP ONE: S—suspending judgment. In other words, put aside the first opinion, that they are checking you out, for a moment. You can always come back to it. Suspending your judgment to think about the options does not mean the initial judgment is wrong. It also does not mean it is right. You are just stepping back briefly to treat it as one possibility.
Let’s also be more descriptive of what is happening and take into account secondary signals.
First, let’s look at the key body language signal in this situation and examine how it works to display power, so that you can figure out how it moved you to assume you are getting checked out.
Hair display: The person you think is checking you out is making you feel that they are sexually attracted to you, and showing their availability to you by playing with their hair. We’ve been told time and time again, so much so that it is seemingly common knowledge now, that if someone is playing with their hair around you, they are into you. But is this true?
Hair flicks and hair self-grooming are a universal, cross-gender and cross-cultural way of displaying good health by unconsciously showing off genetic power and/or a diet high in nutrition, also therefore showing others that we are powerful. Hair displays can be tribal, sometimes identifying a social group, sometimes showing social rank in the group either by the volume or the height of the hair (giving a height advantage). A socially understood cost of the hair display equally shows prestige through wealth, as with highlights, a trendy cut, weaves and extensions.
Hairstyle can show similarity of tribe and rank in that tribe from a distance. How often can you pick out a friend in the crowd by their hairstyle, cut or color, or suspect someone may be into the kinds of things you are into from their hair? Conversely, have you ever felt you would not hit it off with someone because of their hairstyle? This would fall under the banner of tribal signaling.
Hair displays are a huge trigger for human beings and one of the most recognizable signals when determining whether someone may be a good mate. Displaying hair is a powerful unconscious indicator that attracts others, like a broadcast for others to take notice of you. One study by online lingerie retailer Adore Me tested sales results using the same female fashion model wearing lingerie and adopting different poses. It found that when the model was photographed with her hand in her hair, sales of the product doubled. The hand-on-hip pose—a popular pose among some female Instagrammers trying to make their arms look more elongated and skinny—did not resonate in tests nearly as well as a hand touching the hair, not even if a discount was offered on the merchandise.1
Hair displays often take the form of preening or reflexive self-grooming behavior, a characteristic that occurs throughout the animal kingdom. When we view someone we are attracted to, we may automatically respond by sprucing up to compete with rivals. The gesture attracts attention and shows off the power of good health. If our hair appears to gain body, it effectively increases our size and so in some cases our perceived status. Some hair products will even create a spiky look, which warns competitors to stay away from the pseudopoisonous quills.
So at first glance, if they are touching their hair—it’s looking pretty good for you!
But what more do we see in this scenario?
Targeting: Remember, you caught eye contact with this person. Humans use eye contact as a signal of targeting. As opposed to other mammals, we have highly visible whites of the eyes, which make it easier at a distance to see where another is looking. So it looks as if you may be the target of the hair signal. They look away, then look back at you again, repeating the targeting signal at you. Some tests show that human beings need at least eight of these eye signals to realize they are being targeted. Hey, maybe you missed the first seven or so. Things could definitely be looking up!
See the Whites of Their Eyes
There are over 600 species and subspecies of primates on the planet, and although humans share a sclera, or visible eye whites, with some of these species, the whites of our eyes offer us tremendous advantage. The human sclera is whiter and a more visible part of the eye than it is in other primates. Like everything else in evolution, it comes down to benefit within a niche. With an easily visible sclera, even subtle eye movements can be easily detected from some distance. This makes it easier to detect emotions and intentions, and to understand where another’s gaze and attention are directed. All these elements increase our ability to cooperate and so to survive. As our ancestors developed these traits, those who could cooperate the best passed them on to their descendants. Because of this, it is intuitive for humans to follow each other’s line of sight when simply indicated via the eyes. Most other primates need a full turn of the head to be stimulated into following a target.2
LET’S MOVE TO STEP TWO OF SCAN: C—take in the context. Here’s where things start to get a little more complex. You are at a bar on singles night. It’s crowded. Odds are high that people are hoping to hook up with others. Given this, the odds are now less that it is you who is being checked out. Who else is close by? Your friend? Anybody else? So was the flirt gesture actually directed toward you, or could it have been what we might call a “feint,” a deceptive gesture directed toward you but designed to attract the attention of someone else? The question is, is this person flirting, unconsciously or not, toward you, in order to show off their power, demonstrating that they are getting noticed and so to capture the interest and desire of someone else by creating a sense of competition and high value around themselves?
NOW LET’S LOOK AT STEP THREE IN OUR SCAN THINKING PROCESS: A—ask “What else?” A great place to start is to be self-reflective, or mindful, of our own role in affecting the system. We can ask which of our own feelings and biases are contributing to the situation—that is, which of our desires we are projecting onto other people. For example, take a moment to think about your own feelings of confidence in this situation: If you believe you look great, are well dressed or have put some extra effort into how you look for this event, you could be more likely to believe you are going to get attention. Has that confidence caused you to feel you are of high value in the room? Did you walk in with that feeling of confidence? Are you perceiving the environment as low risk (because of potentially high testosterone levels—regardless of whether you’re male or female)? Perhaps you had a super successful day at work and are riding high on that wave. Or you may be feeling less confident but really desperately want to find a mate and to be looked at and admired—in which case, your bias or hope is that they are signaling to you.
SO HOW DO YOU EXECUTE N, STEP FOUR OF OUR SCAN PROCESS—make a new judgment and get feedback on what the person is thinking about you with a test?
There are plenty of good signals that the environment is perfect for this flirt gesture to be targeted at you—or toward someone else in the room. But which is it?
They say opposites attract, but studies show that a person is more likely to be attracted to someone who is similar to them in a number of ways.3 So the reality is that we often like those who are like us. Long-term compatibility is more probable with someone who is like ourselves.
Knowing that the chances of attraction may be higher the more you resemble each other, you can check if the person checking you out appears to look in any way like you. Or do they look more like someone else in the room, perhaps the friend you came in with? If the latter, it might be your friend they’re attracted to.
Now look around the room to see who else may be similar to the person sending out the signals or who may appear to be of high value in the room—the male or female surrounded by other high-value dating and mating opportunities because of perceived status, height, looks, hair quality or clothing. If not you, maybe your friend is the target, or it could be someone else altogether.
Here is a great way to test your judgment and whether the odds are in your favor:
Try gently distancing yourself so you are physically farther away, perhaps even in a different part of the room, from your friend or from the person you have noted has high value, and see if the same signals are still being directed toward you. Are you still getting those eye targets and hair displays? If so, the next time you make eye contact, try gently holding a gaze with them. If they lock eyes with you, that is a good sign they may be interested in you; if you notice their eyes sliding down over your body, that may likely be the focus of their interest. But their holding a gaze, or looking at your mouth, may suggest your initial assumption was correct. If they do return your gaze, you could give them a smile to see if that is repeated back as well. Smiling is a great way to test if the signals are directed toward you and feel truthful.
Now, depending on how you want to classify a smile, you can come up with many different types: masking smiles that hide negative feelings such as fear, sadness, anger or contempt; smiles designed to soften a risky situation, such as the embarrassed smile, the placating smile and the “I told you that might happen” smile; smiles of acceptance, compliance or engagement; the smile of schadenfreude—malicious joy; smiles of the enjoyment of negative feelings such as enjoyable contempt, enjoyable fear and enjoyable sadness; anticipatory smiles for showing you expect something good to come; plain old fake smiles such as “the Pan Am Smile,” so dubbed after the now defunct airline and alluding to seemingly fake polite smiles the airline staff would flash at passengers; and flirtatious or coy smiles such as the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. All these smiles and many more can show up for different people and cultures in various contexts.
However, one smile, the Duchenne smile, is mentioned many times in this book. It’s named after the nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who codified a number of smiles and many other facial expressions. The Duchenne smile is universal and connected to the feeling of pleasure or true happiness. It involves both voluntary and involuntary contraction of two muscles: the zygomatic major (raising the corners of the mouth by contracting the cheeks) and the orbicularis oculi (narrowing the eyes, which in combination with the cheeks produces wrinkles around the eyes). If the orbicularis oculi is not engaged, it’s not a true smile of happiness.
In this context we suggest delivering a gentle Duchenne smile to signal your pleasure with the situation. If they return a similar smile, this could mean they are open to you too, given all the factors we have outlined.
The next test is to close the distance between you. It is time to approach. Remember, just as in the rest of the animal kingdom, mating among humans is not without some elements of risk, and so you may feel the anxiety associated with risk. Of course, you are in competition with others in that environment. By now you have tested holding a gaze and sending a smile, as well as taking the moment to research the overall scene, and so can act with more confidence that your initial assumption is correct.
Hey! But I’ve Got No Hair!
Given that by age thirty-five two-thirds of males in the United States have lost their hair and by age fifty, 85 percent have, with all this sexual and status signaling with hair, many of you could be getting a little concerned. No worries. In a study conducted by Albert E. Mannes4 at the University of Pennsylvania, men with shaved heads were seen by a group of average twenty-year-olds (60 percent of whom were females and 40 percent males) as 13 percent stronger and taller and with greater leadership potential than men with either a full head of hair or hair that is thinning. So if you are totally bald, though you may have lost some of those desirable hair signals around your genetic health, you may have gained others around your social prestige and general desirability in the right circumstances.
QUICK SCAN
S: Suspending judgment on your initial instinctual reaction to the powerful signal of attraction, the hair display, gives you space to be more descriptive and critically question how true what you see really may be.
C: By taking in the context of the busy singles bar where you catch the body language signals, you can better consider the likelihood that those signals mean what you first think they mean (i.e., flirting and if it is meant for you).
A: When you ask what else you can bring into your thinking, including your own state of mind, you can take into account how your own feelings influence how you believe others are feeling.
N: Your new judgment may not veer far from your initial instinct, but now you have a low-risk tactic (smile and close proximity) to test your more fully considered position that will influence the environment and may stimulate a response and shift of power.