The Last Show with David Cooper
Braden Hall: Who Flirts For Personal Gain - January 6, 2026
07 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the psychology behind flirting?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. Flirting. It can feel romantic, or at least flattering for the person being flirted with. But what if some people flirt less for that connection, and instead to do it as more like a social power move? Tonight we are going to talk about the psychology of flirting.
Some people do it for love, others for favors, and everyone else, I guess, in between. I'm here with Brayden Hall, who researches this area. He's an experimental psychology researcher at the University of Alabama. Brayden, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I love that your area of focus is flirting. What inspired you to go into this area of study?
Yeah, honestly, I just always enjoyed flirting with people myself. And so I wanted to do a PhD and do research in social psychology because I just find that interesting.
Chapter 2: How do dark personality traits influence flirting behavior?
And No one really, there's not a lot of people that research flirting, but it's something that everyone does at least like a few times in their life. So I always just found it really interesting. And I've always been interested in what we call sexy research, which is like research that people find like very attractive and interesting.
So like no disrespect to the people who study like how many times, like how many things we can remember at once. But yeah, I just find this stuff really interesting.
No shade on them, although it does feel like you're throwing a little shade on them. I'm a little offended you didn't flirt with me at the commercial break, but I guess we're here to do something professional. Okay, before we go any further, we got to talk about these personality traits, these triads or whatever, the dark... personality traits? What are they?
I mean, I've heard about them before, but they're always so fun.
Yeah. So narcissism is the one that most people have heard of. So people who are narcissistic tend to be very unreasonably entitled. So they think that they are the best thing since sliced bread. And so the world owes them tons of things that they don't owe other people.
And then there's Machiavellianism, which is based off Machiavelli's The Prince, which is basically people who are very tactically manipulative. So they see people as kind of a means to an end and as kind of like pawns in the game they're playing. So they almost always have like an ulterior motive to do whatever they're doing.
So we got self-involvement, we got manipulativeness. What's the last one?
And then psychopathy. These people are like very callous and unemotional, but they're also very erratic and impulsive. So these people like the like the guy who like does like like wheelies on his motorcycle, but like doesn't really have like a lot of empathy for people like he's he's a little psychopathic.
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Chapter 3: What are the different types of flirting motivations?
So if he causes a car accident while doing a wheelie, he doesn't care. Yeah, no, not really, yeah. Okay, so these are the kind of dark traits. Where do we associate them, or how do we associate them with flirting? This seems a little troubling, especially because we all have friends who are flirts. Yeah, yeah.
So not a lot of people have studied the personality traits associated with flirting, and a lot of psychologists just tend to study the things that help us in the world and the things that... like, make us happy and, you know, allow us to flourish and stuff. 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. 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... 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.
Now, are there reasons to flirt that aren't trying to get ahead? Like I'm imagining the early days of me dating my girlfriend. We spent all night texting each other, flirting. The end goal was to form a romantic bond. That's got to be one kind that a lot of people do, and surely that can't be associated with dark personality traits.
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.
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Chapter 4: How do narcissism and Machiavellianism relate to flirting?
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.
So on this other category of flirting, like someone who might do it, I don't know, to get a raise at work or to get a promotion or to get a discount on something or I don't know to get a hand in their social group to get more social standing even though the people they're flirting with they would never actually pursue romantically what about folks who do it like that
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. We recently did another study and found that students higher in narcissism are more likely to flirt with their professors in order to try to get like higher grades or make the professor like them and stuff like that.
Yeah, I never had that ability because I'm not attractive, but I wonder if I would have used it had I had been attractive. How do you even go about studying this stuff? Do you lock a bunch of attractive people in a room, set up cameras, and say go? I assume that's not your methodology.
No, no, I tried to do that, and the university had a lot of problems with that. You can't lock people in rooms. How many times do we have to tell you? Yeah, we for this study, we asked most most psychosocial psych studies. We just ask people and most people surprisingly are very open with their dark personalities.
Like a narcissistic person is very happy to tell you that they think they are better than everyone else. So we ask them questions like that. We give them different personality inventories.
and then we asked them basically and across a bunch of different situations like how well do you think you flirt in these situations and they just kind of write on a scale and then we asked two people that knew them well so we asked people like hey go find two of your friends or your mom has she seen you flirt or like your girlfriend or boyfriend whatever
And then they report like, how well do you think this person flirts? And then we can average all that together to get a pretty good idea or the best idea we can get about how skilled someone is.
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Chapter 5: What are the advantages of dark personality traits in flirting?
So for like, yeah, hopefully me and you like we're not flirting with our bosses or like flirting. Oh, I don't like in church or something like that. But yeah, like in a bar at a party, we might be flirting like a lot more. Or if we're, you know, just trying to get something from someone. But people hiring these dark traits, they kind of view the situation as like a moot point.
So if they're at work, all they're thinking is if I get my boss to kind of think that I'm attractive and that I'm kind of into them, then that's a way for me to step up the ladder. Or if they're at like, oh, I don't like the supermarket or whatever, and they want someone to do something for them. So the setting matters less for those types of people. But there are definitely places where
It's like less socially acceptable.
For someone who's listening and thinking to themselves, man, the other day someone flirted with me, flattered me. Were they doing it for themselves to get ahead? Were they doing it for me? What's an important takeaway from your study?
Yeah, I would say pay attention to what they do after. So if like you think a woman was really interested in you at the bar and you buy her a drink and then when you turn around, she's like gone. She really didn't think much about you, but she really liked your wallet a little more.
All right. Well, next time someone flirts with me and then ask me to bring out my checkbook. Side note, who brings out a checkbook these days? I will. I'll second guess it. Brayden, thanks for coming on the show and sharing a little bit about your research. I appreciate you talking to me. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me.
Braden Hall is an experimental psychology researcher at the University of Alabama.
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