This post may get downvoted, as I suspect it's of low value and low interest to a lot of readers. You shouldn't take this personally.
For what it's worth, I admire your approach, though it's based on incorrect assumptions. Trying to calculate whether someone is attracted to you will not end well. Researching psychology for romantic reasons will probably also not end well.
People solve this problem by making bigger and bigger signals at each other, until either one side stops making the bigger signals or until the signals are so big you can't ignore them, (also known as "flirting"). If this sounds hard and unreliable, that's because it is. It takes a lot of practice to get good at this. You would be best advised to practice talking to people while trying to figure out how they feel about the conversation instead of carrying out this sort of research.
Dude, you are overthinking this and I'm speaking from experience here, but if you don't know one way or the other, you have to make some sort of a move. I dunno whether its best for you to ask him or her for a drink and 'see what happens' or drop subtle hints or just be upfront about it, but you have to do something and then if you are rejected then there are other fish in the sea.
Otherwise, the longer you leave it, the weirder it gets. Once you have become good friends, you are no longer asking them out for a casual drink, you are asking them for a serious relationship.
I have not been able to find anything about the prior of someone being in love with you.
You're just asking them out for a drink. That's all. Unless you are following 19th century social norms, you are allowed to go out with someone you are not yet in love with, and while falling in love may take time, generally people make up their minds about whether they find each other attractive pretty quickly.
A twelve-year-old sixes_and_sevens had the 1988 print of Psychology: The Essential Science and The Definitive Book of Body Language. He was not a hit with the ladies.
Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to be an Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available.
--The Thief of Time
People are in general very, very bad at spotting signs of interest. This is not unique to you. - The non-verbal communication channel for "I'd like to get to know you in a romantic fashion" just does not work very well at all.
Trying to become adept at reading it is, of course, possible but unless you have sky high social intelligence to begin with, I do not recommend it.
What you need to do instead is figure out how to express unambiguous, unmistakable interest in a way that does not scare the shit out of potential romantic partners. If someone ...
First of all, crushes can get to the state where it is really hard to think rationally about them (Love and Limerence by Dorthy Tennov includes several example of irrationality). So I recommend trying to think rationally, but always consider the possibility that you are completely or partially wrong.
Second, realize that your own estimate of their attraction to you may very well be in the statistical noise range. From "Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship" by Bleske-Rechek et al. your estimates of their attraction is much ...
Here a poll corresponding to the survey as proposed.
How many people do you know?(*) [pollid:965]
*) People you know for the purpose of this question are those you know well enough that you could have a crush on them. As a reference take people whom you have seen on more than 5 days in the last half year and had at least 5 hours of private conversation during that time. Please only count the people of a gender you are interested in. Do not include family members. (no, I can't offer a "see results" on th...
While generally this approach seems like a bad idea, the kind of thing our kind of people do in their teenage years with no success and look back on with varying degrees of embarrassment like others in the thread have reminisced on, the survey to calculate priors seems like a useful and good idea. Like maybe you can't get the signal-perceiving ability of neurotypicals from books and have to get that stuff drilled in by experience, but having a prior to work with is one point where this approach might actually help you out.
But, you need to be careful about ...
I upvoted this because I'm interested in the same question, I like the methodology. I'm inclined to upvote almost any nontrollish newbie post to encourage participation but that's not the reason here.
But I really suggest spell-checking. A typo in the title is an indicator of low quality esp. here on LW and sets a vote achor even LWs can't seem to ignore. Note that you can still fix typos by clicking on the edit button below your post (the pencil).
Could you give a reference for love psychology?
One problem I see is trying to see the signals that would raise the crush probability ... While you would also need to see the signals that would make that probability drop.
The sensible route seems in my opinion to be what signals would they give me if they didn't have a crush on me ?, as you seem to be going the confirmation bias route otherwise.
I'm also one of those for whom the whole "You're overthinking this, don't think, stay natural" simply does not work. I appreciate the idea of such a survey to get a prior though, it seems like a great idea.
Are you sure you don't want to ask about the respondent's age and relationship status in the survey?
My own past experience is that I'm awful at reading signals. I'd been taken by complete surprise in the past to learn that some people had a crush on me and my initial response had been to either disbelieve it or else assume it wasn't serious. Sometimes it would dawn on me mid-conversation that the other person had a markedly different idea of where things were headed and I'd be left trying (and failing) to disengage gracefully.
I don't think I need to have spend 5 hours in private conversation with a girl to be interested in her to the extend that I want to ask her for a date. I don't think that "know well enough that you could have a crush on them" is a meaningful category.
However I think this part is less important than finding the prior, because most people have at least a general idea about what certain signals mean from personal experience
Physical intimacy is a signal that a person likes me, but without knowing the baseline for the other person it means little.
I took your survey and recommend the following changes:
Allow zero as an allowed value. I tried to set 0 and failed.
Consider allowing non-integer values (I considered 0,5)
Add a text field for comments (I wanted to give the above feedback there; it also allows simple anonymous feedback in a way LW doesn't - beware trivial inconveniences)
Consider to add a field to give personal estimate of crush-ratios - you can use the to report calibration
Note that you could much increase participation by adding a LW poll of the same. I can do if you don't know how.
Eyes dilate when they look at you, they seem happier around you than when not, they introduce conversational topics that are about you or them but not other people, open body language (varies slightly by culture) directed towards you in public situations, very open body language in private situations, they laugh at your stupid jokes, they share secrets about themselves, they are enthusiastic about talking about sex, they are prone to affectionate touching (shoulders, chin, and upper arms in particular, at least in the US).
It's actually very easy to tell wh...
If you have a crush on someone you usually want to find out if they have one on you too. In my opinion outright asking them is often not a good solution, because if they don't have a crush on you yet it decreases the chance of this ever happening if they know you have one. This believe is based on what I read about love psychology. Hovever I don't really want to discuss the option of outright asking them in this thread, therefore I have not elaborated further how I got to this believe.
The alternative to asking them is trying to interpret signals that they might give you. However to know how many signals you need before you should believe that they are in love with you, you would need the prior. I have not been able to find anything about the prior of someone being in love with you. Therefore my Idea is to do a survey in order to find out how likely it is that a person you know has a crush on you. The plan is to ask the person taking the survey how many people they know well enough to possibly have a crush on them and how many people they actually have a crush on.
I have created a Survey for this and would be really happy if you would participate.
The next stepp would be to discuss how certain signals a person can give you raise the probability of them having a crush on you. That part is quite difficult. I think probably the best way would be to check how your friends react to certain situations and what body language they show you and then, if you find out someone has a crush on you, to look up what he did differently from people who are merely your friends. I am currently not in a good position to do this experiment but if someone wants to try or has results about this to share please do so. However I think this part is less important than finding the prior, because most people have at least a general idea about what certain signals mean from personal experience while at least I have no idea at all what the prior might be.