Good Dancers are Seen as Promiscuous
What’s your type?
It’s true that we all have different ideas about what makes an attractive partner, whether it’s looks, personality, or values. But it’s unlikely that we each have a type: an ideal soul mate.
Instead, what we find most alluring can change depending on the type of relationship we’re after.
When Bridget Jones was in the mood for a booty call, she’d invite bad boy Daniel Cleaver to wrestle her out of her massive knickers. When dreaming of marriage, she’d fall into the arms of that ever reliable fan of abysmal Christmas jumpers, Mark Darcy. I think something similar but possibly more highbrow happens in Pride and Prejudice. I wouldn’t know. I ditched it after the first fifty pages (not enough fighting robot dinosaurs).
Anyway, point is, women often want different things in a long-term partner than in a short-term partner. And research suggests that the same might be true of men. We men value faithfulness in partners we’re interested in sticking with for the long haul, but promiscuity might be more of a turn on when we’re hankering for a hook up.
Now, it’s not as if men can ask women directly “what are the chances we’ll be at it like rabbits in the next 60 minutes?” Well, they could (and some probably do), but I don’t imagine it’s the most successful tactic for anyone other than Ryan Gosling. Instead, we pay attention to a whole host of physical and behavioural signals. These needn’t be signals that women are giving out intentionally. Nevertheless, men make assumptions based on those signals. Is that a fair or right thing to do? Maybe not. But nobody said humans were fair.
One important signal could be a woman’s dancing ability. The way a woman struts her stuff on the dance floor might send signals to men on the lookout for a fling.
Susanne Röder of the University of Bamberg in Germany recorded the dance movements of 86 women using a motion capture system. In fact, the dances were all recorded in the motion capture laboratory just down the corridor from where I work, at Northumbria University. Northumbria has one of the best facilities for motion capture outside of Hollywood, except we don’t craft amazing digital characters like Gollum from Lord of the Rings or Caesar the chimp from the Planet of the Apes movies (although we could if Andy Serkis paid us a visit). Instead we use the same sort of techniques to record how Northumbria students move.
Anyway, Röder had women boogie away to a 30 second dance track, recorded the dances using motion tracking cameras, and then she applied those dances to a featureless avatar. This way, when she later asked a group of men to watch the dancing avatars and rate how attractive they were, she knew that the men were basing their judgments on how the women moved, not on how they looked. There was no other information for the men to go on.
Then she took the five most attractive dancers and the five least attractive dancers and showed them to another 100 heterosexual men. These man rated how attractive and how promiscuous the dancers appeared to be. Half of the men rated the women’s attractiveness for a long-term relationship, and half for a short-term relationship.
Röder found that attractive dancers were rated as more promiscuous. Whether or not men are correct to link dancing skill with sexual behavior, we don’t know for sure. But anyway, that’s what we do. If you can pull shapes on the dance floor, men reckon you’ll be more likely to hop into bed too.
As we would expect, men found the five most attractive dancers to be more attractive than the five least attractive dancers. No surprises there. But their ratings depended on whether they were judging for a long- or a short-term partner. Attractive dancers were more appealing as a one night stand than a marriage partner, which makes sense if dancing ability is perceived as a sign of promiscuity.
I’d be interested to know if women judge male dancers in a similar way. Although, when I think back to my misspent youth in the nightclubs of Liverpool, the most popular dance move among men was to take their shirts off and swing them around their heads. And you’d hardly need to be a body language expert to decipher that signal.
Röder, S., Weege, B., Carbon, C.-C., Shackelford, T. K., & Fink, B. (2015). Men’s perception of women’s dance movements depends on mating context, but not men’s sociosexual orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 172–175. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 11 August 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
