Review
Flirting, if we continue to interpret it as a game between two agents, seems to have some interesting properties.
The "permission handshake" Scott Alexander points out (thanks, @noggin-scratcher) looks to be the core of the flirting game. 's goal is to gain permission to be romantically intimate with while not letting know that they're doing this, at least not immediately such that can make up their mind regarding the matter. 's general strategy comes in two parts: gain this permission incrementally (i.e. spending time with , initiating physical contact as opposed to directly asking for a romantic relationship), and asking for permission using the handshake.
Because of this fundamental element of ambiguity, flirting is surprisingly challenging to understand using mathematical theories. The handshake, while easy for most humans to understand, in a sense flies in the face of classical logic because genuinely wants to convey and not convey attraction. This can't be resolved by simply saying that solely conveys attraction clearly. but in very small steps: an intelligent would notice the pattern and could then realize too soon that is romantically interested in them. It is not immediately obvious to me how one would regiment the handshake. Classical game theory makes the assumption that all agents' strategies are common knowledge. This is a comically bad assumption to make here: if knew 's strategy, then they would immediately deduce that is flirting, ruining the point of the exercise. I would imagine Young's theory of evolutionary game theory as presented in Individual Strategy and Social Structure, which is able to replicate much of game theory without this assumption, would help with that. Another wrinkle comes from the assumption that all agents are know they are playing a game. As already stated, ideally should not immediately realize that is playing the game with them. Continuing down the connection to evolutionary game theory, perhaps has an initial strategy of "no strategy," but then develops one once they gain enough information to begin considering if the "flirting game" is being played.
I'd like to linger on that last realization that isn't fully aware that they are participating in a game, as that's connected to a core part of flirting: it is simultaneously cooperative and adversarial. Assuming that they are a boundedly rational agent, does not know if has figured out that is flirting with them, and does not want them to know before is comfortable making their attraction common knowledge, as stated above. Once has collected enough information such that they're a conscious player of the game, they do not want 's attraction to to become common knowledge, if at all, until they've decided how to respond, and they do not know if knows they know assuming too is boundedly rational. So, flirting is adversarial from the point of . At the same time, and assumedly have a common goal: to preserve their relationship and possibly elevate it if mutually desired. Thusly, flirting is a cooperative game where both players are incentivized to work together without directly communicating.
In realizing the above, it is clear that flirting for each player is asymmetric in its adversarial aspect: is primarily focused on intelligently conveying information, while deduces and ultimately ends the game. Furthermore, this behavior comes about because is, ideally for , not a conscious participant of the game the whole time: the game slowly transitions from being a one— to two-player game as gets more info.
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I think a good next step is defining an ontology of flirting and then understanding it from an information-theoretic perspective. Gaining more intuition for how to logically regiment interactions should enable one to get over the conceptual roadblocks discussed above and give us tools to understand how might interpret "hints" given by . Fox's "Flirting Report" gives a good starting point in this regard. Below are some rules of thumb for a prior distribution of whether someone is flirting or not:
- (cisgender) men are inclined to interpret most positive (cisgender) women behavior conveying attraction (pg. 5)
- men flirt slightly more than women (pg. 8)
- young people flirt a lot (pg. 8)
- single people flirt more with friends or strangers by quite a large margin (pg. 8)
- flirting with someone's partner is generally taboo (pg. 9)
- flirting is most considered socially acceptable where initiating conversation with strangers is common place, alcohol is available, and where A and B share some common interest (pg. 11)
An important part of this ontology will be distinguishing playful teasing and flirting. A large part of the ambiguity present in the flirting comes about due to, absent of context, flirting and teasing being identical. Of course, is trying to shield from said context. If and how can distinguish between the two will be an important part of understanding flirting in this context.
I really appreciate you taking the time and writing a whole post in response to my post, essentially. I think I fundamentally disagree with the notion that any past of this game is adversarial, however. There are competing tensions, one pulling to communicate more overtly about their feelings, and one pulling to be discreet and communicate less overtly. I don't see this as adversarial because I don't model the event " finds out that is into them" to be terminally bad, just instrumentally bad; It is bad because it can cause the bad things, which is what a large part of my post is dedicated to.
I find it much more useful to model this as a cooperative game, but one in which is cooperating with two different counterfactual s, the one who reciprocates the attraction and the one who does not. is trying to maximize both people's values by flirting in the way I define in this post, there's just uncertainty over which world they live in. If they knew which world they lived in, then the strategy for maximizing both and 's values looks a lot less conflicted and complicated; either they do something friendship-shaped or something romance-shaped, probably.
I could swear there was a similar Scott Alexander post, about flirting deliberately skirting the edge of plausible deniability to avoid prematurely creating common knowledge. With an analogy to spies trying to identify a fellow operative without overtly tipping their hand in case they were mistaken and speaking to a non-spy.
Can't find it now: might have since been deleted, or might have only ever existed on LiveJournal or Tumblr or something.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/26/conversation-deliberately-skirts-the-border-of-incomprehensibility/ is similar but not explicitly about flirting.
You're probably thinking of the russian spies analogy, under section 2 in this (archived) livejournal post.
Ah that's interesting, thanks for finding that. I've never read that before, so that wasn't directly where I was drawing any of my ideas from, but maybe the content from the post made it somewhere else that I did read. I feel like that post is mostly missing the point about flirting, but I agree that it's descriptively outlining the same thing as I am.
[Epistemic status: I'm mostly trying to outline a class of strategy that you could use to do something rather similar to what people term "flirting", rather than say that everything that's ever called "flirting" fits this model. I'm lowering my standards so that this gets posted at all instead of sitting in my drafts folder, so I might've made some important mistakes somewhere.]
In this post, I'll use "X is common knowledge between you and me" to not only mean "you know X and I know X," but also "I know that you know X" and "I know that you know that I know X" and so on (this is pretty standard in mathematical logic contexts, although distinct from the colloquial meaning). The simplest way to get common knowledge of X is for one of us to just say X out loud.
These ideas are only partially my own: I've read bits and pieces of this theory in different places in the past few years. I haven't been able to find sources for most of it. I know some of it is scattered across Planecrash, and reading that story is what got me thinking about this again recently, but that's probably not their original source. As far as I can tell, I'm the only person to synthesize them all together in a post, but please let me know if I'm wrong.
As stated above, this is less about trying to describe everything ever called flirting, rather trying to outline a strategy that can exist and then exploring the implications of that strategy.
Consider the situation where person A is romantically attracted to person B, but they're currently just friends. Flirting-like strategies likely apply more generally, but the romantic case is a good starting point. Let's say that person A's values are approximately:
(If you want to pause and ponder, pause right here, since I outline the strategy in the next paragraph.)
In certain social contexts, it's totally fine to just make the attraction common knowledge and move straight to the "A and B are in a romantic relationship" or the "nothing changes" outcomes. But in other cases, it can make a lot of sense for people to take things slower and convey the information in a more subtle way. Flirting is the deferment of common knowledge of attraction, and instead opting for sending little bits of Bayesian evidence about attraction. Instead of reaching common knowledge instantly, it takes some time get there, or never gets there at all. This has benefits over the "person A just makes it common knowledge immediately" approach:
It really seems like this can be generalized beyond romantic contexts, but right now I am just trying to get these ideas out on the internet, rather than explore every possible corner of them. Some related-feeling things that might be interesting to explore this class of strategies with:
There are definitely more avenues to theorize about this. I especially feel like I didn't capture how flirting interacts with the finer tensions in the social fabric, and I'm interested to hear other people's ways of articulating this.