It's hard to think of a more awkward
experience than talking to an attractive stranger.
It's like having a stomach full of
butterflies and a mouthful of peanut butter: Um, uh, how are you?
Helpfully, social science has done a
little empirical research about how to begin a conversation.
Enter a study in the journal Sex Roles lead
by University of Alaska psychologist Chris L. Kleinke.
He asked 600 respondents to rate the
effectiveness of three kinds of opening lines:
• "Pick-up" lines
like "You must be a librarian, because I saw you checking me
out"
• Open-ended, innocuous questions
like "What do you think of this band?" or "What team are you
rooting for?"
• Direct approaches like
"You're cute — can I buy you a drink?"
The responses were pretty evenly
split along gender lines: While the men in the study tended to prefer the more
direct approach, the women tended to prefer the open-ended, innocuous
questions.
Not surprisingly, very few people
said they preferred the pick-up lines. The authors said that pick-up lines
persist because they're "reinforced by popular books and magazines
that stimulate our fantasies with stories overplaying the number of
'successful pickups' that actually occur in real life."
So it's best to go with a mild,
inoffensive opener.
"The advantage of
innocuous opening lines is that they offer a less threatening context for the
recipient's response," the authors write.
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