The discovery was astonishing about the courtship of people

People, both men and women, are very poor in identifying courtship, according to new research.

>>>Tips to flirt through unbelievable scientific truths

Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas and also the author of the "5 flirtations" published in 2013, conducted a study to see unfamiliar male and female couples. each other identifies exactly how often the " partner" is flirting. "If you think someone is not interested in you, you may be right. As if someone falls in love with you, you might miss that," Mr. Hall concluded.

According to a research report published in Communication Research, Professor Hall and his colleagues recruited 52 single female and male students who did not know each other. Men and women are then allowed to sit alone in a room and chat for 10-12 minutes in the experiment they think is to study the first impressions.

At the end of the study, students were asked to fill out survey questionnaires in separate rooms. In it, they have to inform whether they flirt or not and whether they think their partner has flirted with them.

According to researchers, both men and women are very poor in detecting others flirting with themselves.(Photo: Alamy)

The results revealed, while couples correctly guessed that 80% of "partners" were not flirting, they were less accurate about their ability to detect when they were being flirted. Only 36% of men who participated in the study correctly identified, while this rate in women was only 18%.

Mr. Hall explained: " Flirtatious behavior is difficult to observe for many reasons. People will not do it in conspicuous ways, because they do not want to be embarrassed. The courtship is therefore very similar to showing off. friendly".

In the second experiment, Mr. Hall and his colleagues gave 250 viewers 6 videos, 1 minute long for those in the first experimental interaction. Only show videos of a certain person at a time.

These "third party" observers also failed to achieve more accurate results than those directly involved in the interaction, about flirting detection. Specifically, when flirting did not occur, they correctly identified 66%. But when flirtatious behavior, they only identified 38% correctly.

The exact recognition rate reached the lowest level when women observed men flirting. They only judge correctly 22% of the time. Both the weak and the strong are more easily detected when women are actively subject to courtship. This may be because, women tend to be more transparent .

According to researcher Hall, the difficulty in identifying flirting behavior can stem from the same cause as the fact that we have problems with the ability to detect a liar. It is due to the assumption that most of us are telling the truth because most people do it and that among those who are not telling the truth, only a small group is always cheating.

The same thing can happen for flirting . Most people in most of the time do not flirt with anyone they communicate, although some people sometimes flirt and some flirt a lot. In other words, we're not used to flirting, so it's hard to discover signs of that behavior.

So researchers say that the secret to helping someone know they like you is to give up ambiguous things to make them more explicit.