Braden Hall

like make us happy and and you know allow us to flourish and stuff um and until recently people have seen these dark traits as very just like wholly bad basically like they cause people to be less satisfied with their life they cause them lots of personal problems um but there are a few areas of life where these personality traits actually confer somewhat of an advantage and so i was always interested in um

how these traits can actually be advantageous to the people that have them.

And so flirting is an area where these types of people tend to do rather well.

And they do so with this like instrumental flirting because it's very easy to, you know, like woo someone or whatever when you don't really care whether they get upset about anything.

You're just trying to get something from them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, totally.

That's like by and large the most common reason that people flirt.

So we call that relational flirting.

So you're flirting to just enhance the intensity of a relationship.

So people flirt with strangers to try to become like a little closer to them.

And then yeah, throughout relationships, people continue to flirt to strengthen that relationship.

I mean, there are several different motives, but yeah, the people high in the dark traits that we found are rather uninterested in that kind of flirting.

That's like boring.

Except narcissistic people, they were slightly interested in that, likely because they just enjoy any positive attention that they get from anyone.

Yeah, so yeah, like we found, those people tend to be a little higher in the dark traits.

And it kind of boils down to the fact that most people view flirting as kind of like a special behavior that we reserve for people that we are romantically interested in.

So we don't just flirt with people just for whatever reason.

But these people view it the same way that you might view like giving someone a tip or just like complimenting someone.

It's just like a tool to do whatever.