Braden Hall: Who Flirts For Personal Gain - January 6, 2026
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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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the psychology behind flirting?
0:01–1:06
2
How do dark personality traits influence flirting behavior?
1:06–2:56
3
What are the different types of flirting motivations?
2:56–4:58
4
How do narcissism and Machiavellianism relate to flirting?
4:58–7:53
5
What are the advantages of dark personality traits in flirting?
7:53–9:45
Speakers
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