The Unanswered Message

I · Six Hours

Before running their experiment, a team working out of Leuphana University in Lüneburg did something unfashionable: they asked a hundred people what the answer already was. Fifty women and fifty men, average age thirty-eight, were invited to say how long a person should wait, after a first date has gone well, before sending the message. The hundred converged with some confidence on roughly six hours. Under twenty minutes, they said, was too soon. Beyond forty hours was too late. Somewhere in that interval lies a folk theory that almost everyone in the sample could state and nobody in the sample had tested—that eagerness is a liability, that a certain rationing of contact is the thing that makes a person want you.

Lars Teichmann, Hannes Petrowsky, Lea Boecker, Meikel Soliman, and David Loschelder then tested it, on five hundred and forty-three heterosexual participants in the United States and Britain, average age forty, who read a first-date scenario and were told the message arrived immediately, the next morning, or two days later. The result, published this year in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, is the most useful single finding in this entire literature, and it does not say what the hundred said. Intentions to pursue the relationship peaked in the middle—6.15 for the next-morning message, against 5.80 for the immediate one and 5.50 for the two-day delay. The curve is an arch. The three-day rule is on the wrong side of it, and so, more mildly, is the answer-at-once.

What makes the study worth an essay rather than a paragraph is what the authors found underneath. They measured five candidate explanations. The one that carried the effect was reciprocity: how much the recipient believed the sender liked them, which fell from 6.54 for the immediate message to 6.10 for the next morning to 4.86 after two days, and to which women were more sensitive than men. Perceived neediness behaved exactly as the folk theory predicts—the fast reply looked needier—and then failed to predict attraction at all. Thoughts about the sender did not carry it. And perceived mate value, the whole engine of the belief that scarcity advertises quality, did not meaningfully mediate anything. Attachment style, preregistered as a moderator, moderated nothing.

This magazine has written before about who is wanted and roughly why. What follows is a narrower question, and a more contested one, because it is a question about tactics rather than traits. The folk theory comes in three parts, and its precision is what makes it testable. First: that a man who makes contact scarce is more attractive to women than one who does not. Second: that a man about whose sexual exclusivity a woman is uncertain is more attractive still, because being wanted by other women is read as a certificate of quality. Third: that the combination is what drives women to compete—to improve, to spend, to strive—in order to have such a man to themselves.

All three have real science under them. None of the three survives the science in the form the belief requires. And the shape of the failure is the same each time, which is the most interesting thing about it: in three separate literatures—how long to wait before writing, how many people a person has slept with, how available a person appears—the relationship between the quantity and the desirability is an inverted U. The advice reads the left half of that curve, where less contact does mean more interest, and mistakes it for a law that runs all the way to the right.

II · Forty-Seven Undergraduates

The scientific warrant for the first proposition rests, to a degree that is startling once you notice it, on a single experiment with forty-seven people in it. In 2011 the psychologists Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert asked forty-seven female undergraduates at the University of Virginia to hand over their Facebook profiles, told them that male students at other universities had rated those profiles, and then showed them four men. A third were told these were the men who had liked them best. A third were told the men had rated them about average. The last third were told the profiles were either the men who liked them most or the men who had rated them average—they would not be told which.

The women in the uncertain condition were the most attracted, more attracted even than the women who had been told they were the favourite. Reported in Psychological Science under the title “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not…”, it is a genuinely charming result and it has been carrying an enormous amount of freight ever since. It is worth setting down what it actually consists of. The overall effect of condition on attraction was strong, with an F of 15.06 and an eta squared of .41. The contrast that matters—uncertain against liked-best—came in at t = 2.07, p = .04, on roughly fifteen or sixteen women per cell.

The mechanism is the part that has aged least well, and the authors are the ones who said so. Their proposal was that uncertainty works by keeping the mind returning to the unresolved: not knowing, you think about him, and thinking about him you want him. The overall effect of condition on how much the women thought about the men was not significant—F of 2.14, p = .13. The planned contrast reached p = .05. And in the mediation itself, being in the uncertain condition predicted thinking about the men, but thinking about the men predicted attraction only marginally, at p = .10, with a confidence interval the authors describe as not quite excluding zero. The finding is real; the explanation was left as a hypothesis, in the paper that proposed it.

Two years later a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, Brian Richards, built a dissertation on top of it. He set out to establish who the effect works on—his candidate moderator was a personality measure, the need for structure—and to conceptually replicate the main finding along the way. He did not replicate it. His manipulation worked, by his own checks: participants in the permanently uncertain condition did report feeling more uncertain about the man’s opinion of them. Attraction, he writes, did not vary between any conditions, thereby failing to replicate Whitchurch and colleagues. The dissertation is unpublished and has not been through peer review, which is a real limit on what it can be asked to bear; it can support the claim that the effect has not reliably reproduced, and it cannot support a number.

But something did survive in Richards’s data, and it is the thing worth taking away. Within the uncertain condition, how much a woman reported wondering about the man predicted how attracted she later was, even after controlling for how attracted she had been at the start. The main effect died and the mechanism lived. Uncertainty is not, on this evidence, a thing that makes a man attractive. Occupying someone’s thoughts is a thing that makes a man attractive, and uncertainty is one comparatively unreliable way of buying that—alongside, one notes, being interesting, being present, and being good company.

III · Wanting and Liking

The oldest study in the file is also the one most consistently misreported. In 1973 Elaine Walster, G. William Walster, Jane Allyn Piliavin, and Lynn Schmidt published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology whose opening move is an act of scientific candour rare in any decade: they ran five experiments to show that hard-to-get dates are valued more highly than easy-to-get ones, and all five failed. The paper is titled “‘Playing hard to get’: understanding an elusive phenomenon,” and the elusiveness in the title is not the coquette’s. It is the effect’s.

In the sixth experiment they found it, by changing the hypothesis. What won was not the person who was hard to get. It was the person who was selectively hard to get—difficult for everyone else, available to you. That target beat the uniformly hard-to-get, the uniformly easy, and the target about whom nothing was known. The finding is fifty-three years old and has never been improved on, and it says something close to the opposite of the advice it is used to license. Two footnotes are owed to it. Its subjects were men evaluating women, so it is not a direct answer to the question this essay is asking. And its logic is the logic of the compliment: what is attractive is not inaccessibility but discrimination, evidence that a person who could have been elsewhere has chosen to be here.

The modern account of why the confusion persists comes from Xianchi Dai, Ping Dong, and Jayson Jia, writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2014. Playing hard to get, they found, does two things at once and in opposite directions: it increases how much the pursuer wants the pursued, and it decreases how much the pursuer likes them. And the split is conditional. It appears only when the pursuer is already psychologically committed to the pursuit. Where that commitment is absent—where the person has not yet decided you are worth chasing—playing hard to get reduces both wanting and liking. The tactic does not create interest. It taxes interest that already exists, and pays out in a different currency from the one it takes.

That two-currency arrangement is not a metaphor borrowed for the occasion. The neuroscientists Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson have spent three decades establishing that wanting and liking are separable in the brain: incentive salience, the state of finding something urgent and pursuit-worthy, is generated by what they describe as large and robust mesolimbic dopamine systems, while liking—the actual pleasure of the thing when you get it—is mediated by smaller and fragile systems and does not depend on dopamine at all. Their subject is addiction, not courtship, and no one has put a woman in a scanner and shown her an ambiguous text message. But the architecture explains the phenomenology exactly. A man who withholds contact can make himself more urgent without making himself more pleasant, and the person on the other end will experience the urgency as evidence of the pleasantness, because from the inside they are extremely difficult to tell apart.

IV · The Company He Keeps

The second proposition—that a woman wants a man more when she cannot be sure he is not sleeping with someone else—has a serious scientific ancestor, and it is worth separating them carefully, because they are not the same claim. The ancestor is mate-choice copying: the idea, first demonstrated in guppies and Japanese quail, that an animal choosing a mate can shortcut the whole expensive business of assessment by observing who has already been chosen. In humans the flagship study is by the psychologists Sarah Hill and David Buss, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2008. Eight hundred and forty-seven participants rated targets shown alone, with same-sex others, or with opposite-sex others. Women rated a man more desirable when he was surrounded by women. Men rated a woman less desirable when she was surrounded by men. The asymmetry is clean, large, and exactly what the folk theory would order.

Then, in 2018, four researchers at the University of New South Wales and the University of Queensland—Amany Gouda-Vossos, Shinichi Nakagawa, Barnaby Dixson, and Robert Brooks—did what the field needed and gathered everything. Their meta-analysis in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology pooled eighteen studies and just over three thousand participant responses. For women judging men shown with a woman rather than alone, the pooled estimate came to a rise of 6.01 per cent in rated attractiveness or desirability. Statistically significant; substantively about a twentieth. The heterogeneity was eighty-eight per cent, meaning the studies disagree with one another far more than they agree. For men judging women, the pooled effect was slightly negative and not significant at all.

The authors then tested the estimate for publication bias by trim-and-fill, which imputes the studies a literature would have if it were not selectively reporting. Two of the three estimators left the effect intact. The third imputed three missing studies and returned a corrected effect of 3.3 per cent, which was no longer significant—roughly half. The authors’ own judgement is that the impact of bias is probably modest, and this magazine will not overrule them. But two further facts from their tables deserve to travel with the headline. None of the unpublished data sets they obtained detected the effect in either sex. And a hundred per cent of the published papers using the other method reported a positive result, which the authors themselves flag as unlikely to be a property of nature.

That other method is the one that matters. The distinction Gouda-Vossos and colleagues draw is between the addition of a cue—is he with a woman or is he alone—and the augmentation of one, in which the woman he is with is manipulated to be more or less desirable herself. The augmentation effect was roughly twice the size of the addition effect on the authors’ scale, and, tellingly, it was consistent: heterogeneity of 6.59 per cent, meaning the studies essentially agreed. And it appeared for men too, which the mere-presence effect never did—though on only two effect sizes, which is thin enough to be worth saying out loud.

This is the crux, and it is fatal to the proposition as stated. What raises a man’s standing is not the suggestion that a woman is available to him. It is the evidence that a specific, evaluable woman chose him. The information being transmitted is a judgement, made by someone whose judgement can itself be assessed. Ambiguity destroys exactly that information: a woman who cannot tell whether he is involved with anyone also cannot tell who, which means she cannot tell what their choosing him was worth. The signal the folk theory recommends manufacturing is the one signal that carries nothing.

The experimental record on attachment itself is thinner than its fame. When the biologists Tobias Uller and Christoffer Johansson had women interview men assigned at random to wear a wedding ring or not, reporting in Human Nature in 2003, the ring did nothing at all—not to rated attractiveness, not to rated social standing, not to willingness to enter a relationship of any length. The strongest positive result belongs to the psychologists Jessica Parker and Melissa Burkley, whose 2009 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that single women were more interested in pursuing a man described as attached than the same man described as single—means of .75 against .17, at p = .02. Read the method and the result narrows considerably. The comparison rests on thirty-five single women split across two conditions, seventeen or eighteen apiece. Every participant saw the same single photograph, a limitation the authors state themselves. And the study it was designed to extend, by Paola Bressan and Debora Stranieri, had found the pattern in the opposite group—partnered women, not single ones—and only at low fertility, a cycle-phase logic that has fared badly since 2018, when a large study led by Benedict Jones found no compelling evidence that women’s masculinity preferences track their hormonal status at all.

V · A Bit of a Past

There is a second body of evidence bearing on the proposition, and the folk theory never cites it, because it runs the other way. In 2017 the psychologists Steve Stewart-Williams, Caroline Butler, and Andrew Thomas asked a hundred and eighty-eight people how willing they would be to enter a relationship with a hypothetical person whose number of past sexual partners was specified, ranging from none to more than sixty. Reporting in The Journal of Sex Research, they found the effect of that number to be very large—and shaped like everything else in this essay. Willingness rose as the number rose from zero, and then fell, and the fall was dramatic. Nobody wants a blank record. Almost nobody wants a long one.

Andrew Thomas and a large international group, with Stewart-Williams among them, extended this in 2025 across eleven countries on five continents, reporting in Scientific Reports. Willingness to pursue a long-term relationship declined as partner numbers rose, and—this is the addition—the trajectory mattered: a history that tapered off over time was judged more favourably than one that held steady or accelerated. On the question of whether men and women judge this differently, both papers report the same thing, and it is not the answer the culture expects. In the 2017 study there was virtually no sex difference for long-term relationships. In the eleven-country replication, sex differences were minimal and inconsistent—little evidence, the authors conclude, of a sexual double standard.

Put the two propositions of Part IV and Part V together and the man the folk theory describes turns out to be standing at the exact point where both curves are falling. Evidence that he has been chosen by someone specific and impressive is an asset, and the meta-analysis says so. Evidence that he is currently choosing widely is a liability, and two studies, the second of them across eleven countries, say so. The ambiguity that the advice recommends cultivating does not sit between these two states; it removes the first and implies the second. It is the worst available position on both curves at once, achieved deliberately.

The prevalence of the behaviour is a separate question from its wisdom, and here the numbers are famous and disputed. David Schmitt and David Buss, surveying Americans averaging forty-one years of age, found that sixty per cent of men and fifty-three per cent of women reported having at some point tried to attract someone already in a committed relationship for a long-term one; for short-term liaisons, sixty per cent of men and thirty-eight per cent of women. A fifty-three-nation follow-up found broadly similar magnitudes. Those figures are the ones that circulate, and they have been contested at the root: Alastair Davies, Todd Shackelford, and Glen Hass argued in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2007 that the standard definition of a poach is loose enough to inflate its own prevalence, and re-estimated accordingly. Poaching happens. How often is a definitional argument as much as an empirical one.

VI · What Kindness Does

If withholding is not the mechanism, something has to be, and the most sustained programme of work on the question belongs to the Israeli psychologist Gurit Birnbaum and the American Harry Reis, who have spent fifteen years asking what responsiveness—attention, understanding, the demonstrated sense that one has been heard—does to desire. Their answer is not uniform, and the parts of it that do not flatter kindness are the parts worth reporting first.

In 2014, with Tsachi Ein-Dor and Noam Segal, Birnbaum and Reis studied initial acquaintanceships—strangers meeting for the first time—and found the effect running in one direction only. Men who met a responsive woman rated her more feminine and, through that, more attractive. Women who met a responsive man did not show the equivalent effect. Birnbaum’s suggested reading, offered as interpretation rather than as finding, is that a woman may register a very responsive stranger as vulnerable, or as less dominant. This is the single strongest piece of evidence the folk theory has, and its scope is precise: it concerns a first encounter with a stranger, and it reports an absence of benefit rather than a penalty.

Move to any longer timescale and the sign reverses. In 2012 Birnbaum and Reis had participants discuss a recent difficulty with an unfamiliar partner of the opposite sex—in one study a confederate trained to respond warmly or coolly, in another a standardised exchange of instant messages—and found that perceiving a partner as responsive raised sexual interest in them, chiefly among people low in attachment avoidance. The moderator, that is, sits in the perceiver and not in the tactic. And in 2016, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they reported across three studies that responsiveness was associated with greater sexual desire, and—the detail that ought to end the argument—more strongly in women than in men. The mediators were feeling special, and perceived partner mate value.

That last clause is the pivot of this whole essay. Perceived mate value is the good the scarcity theory is trying to buy. The entire argument for cultivating ambiguity is that a man who seems in demand seems more valuable. Birnbaum and Reis found the same currency being paid out by the opposite behaviour: attending closely to one person raises how valuable that person judges you to be, and does so more reliably in women than in men. Teichmann and colleagues’ 2026 experiment, testing the same currency directly in the texting paradigm, found that perceived mate value did not mediate the timing effect at all—while perceived interest, which is what a prompt reply conveys, did.

There is also a cost side, and it has been measured, if only correlationally. In 2020 the Spanish researchers Raúl Navarro, Elisa Larrañaga, Santiago Yubero, and Beatriz Víllora surveyed six hundred and twenty-six adults between eighteen and forty about two experiences the internet has named. Ghosting is disappearance. Breadcrumbing is the intermittent, non-committal contact that keeps a person present without ever arriving—which is, described neutrally, the tactic this essay has been examining. Those who had been breadcrumbed reported lower satisfaction with life, more loneliness, and more helplessness. Those who had been ghosted showed no significant difference on any of the three. The design is cross-sectional and self-reported, so it establishes an association and not a direction. But the association is the wrong way round for the theory, and it is worth noticing which of the two behaviours turned out to be the one that leaves a mark. Being abandoned, it seems, is survivable. Being kept is the part that costs.

VII · The Rivals

The third proposition is the most ambitious and, in one respect, the best supported: that being wanted by other women is read as a mark of success, and that the reading drives a woman to compete—to make herself more attractive in order to secure such a man. Female intrasexual competition is not a speculation. It is one of the more robustly documented phenomena in this whole field, and it has been documented with unusual ingenuity.

The taxonomy came first. David Buss catalogued the tactics of mate attraction in 1988, and two years later, with Lisa Dedden, the tactics of competitor derogation. The sex differences were specific rather than general: women derogate rivals disproportionately on appearance and on fidelity—calling a rival promiscuous, or incapable of staying with one man—while men reach more often for prowess and resources. Both sexes, democratically, impugn intelligence.

The demonstration came later and is the most quoted experiment in the area. In 2011 the psychologists Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma assigned eighty-six women to pairs and had a female confederate interrupt each pair’s conversation—once dressed conservatively, once in a low-cut blouse and a short skirt. Raters who did not know which version they were watching judged ninety-seven per cent of the participants to have reacted negatively to the second one, and recorded the first as passing more or less unnoticed. Nothing about her had changed except what she was wearing. In a second study the same confederate was assessed as a rival: women did not want to introduce her to their boyfriend, or leave the two of them alone, or be her friend.

The self-improvement half has been measured too. Xijing Wang, Hao Chen, Zhansheng Chen, and Ying Yang, publishing in Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2021, found that the operational sex ratio and income inequality predicted searches for cosmetic surgery, and the density of certified plastic surgeons, and that female students in faculties with more women than men showed greater focus on appearance than students in faculties with more men. And in 2012, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kristina Durante, Vladas Griskevicius, Jeffry Simpson, Stephanie Cantú, and Joshua Tybur reported that a scarcity of men led women to pursue higher-paying careers and to delay starting a family—an effect they traced to the mating market rather than the labour market, and found strongest among the women least able to secure a mate. The briefcase, in their title, over the baby. It is fair to note that this comes from the research programme whose ovulation findings have fared worst under replication, and that its experiments work by priming a scenario rather than observing a market.

So competition is real, and competition drives self-enhancement, and both are measured. And yet the proposition remains untested, because of a gap that becomes obvious only when the studies are laid side by side. Every one of them manipulates a property of the market: how many rivals there are, how attractive a rival is, how unequal the surrounding economy. Not one of them manipulates the ambiguity of a particular man and measures what a particular woman then does about her own appearance, her own earnings, or her own ambition. That study—the study the folk theory is actually about—does not appear to have been run. The competition literature tells us what a woman does when the market is thin. It is silent on what she does when one man is opaque, and the two are not the same question. The magazine’s answer to the third proposition is therefore neither yes nor no. It is that the experiment is missing, and that the inference filling its place is an inference.

VIII · New York’s Small Rooms

The tactic under examination is a signalling strategy: it works, if it works, by making a man appear to be in demand. In a city as large as New York, a claim about an unseen rival is easy to make and difficult for a stranger to check. That is precisely why it conveys so little. A signal that costs nothing to send should be discounted by the person who receives it.

Yet New York is not a single anonymous room. Friends introduce friends; colleagues meet again; a neighborhood can be small even when the city is large. In those settings a person’s conduct becomes observable. What Walster and her colleagues identified in 1973 as the version of the tactic that works—selectivity, the demonstrable fact of having chosen—requires this kind of evidence. The deliberately delayed reply cannot supply it by itself.

No study located for this essay compares the tactic across New York’s social settings. The paragraphs above are an argument about what a receiver can verify, not a finding about local dating behavior. The experiments bearing most directly on the question were run mostly with students and online panels rating strangers in photographs; none manipulates whether a claim about alternatives can be checked. The absent experiment matters more than another anecdote about who waited six hours to write back.

IX · The Unanswered Message

Return to the hundred people on the panel, agreeing that the right answer was about six hours. They were not being stupid. They were reporting, accurately, something they had all noticed: that a reply which arrives too fast can look like a person with nothing else in their life, and that the noticing is real even if the remedy is wrong. The five hundred and forty-three participants who were actually run through the experiment located the optimum a good deal closer to the eager end than the panel had guessed, and the mechanism turned out to be the least mysterious quantity available—whether she thought he liked her.

So the three propositions can be answered, in order. Making contact scarce does not raise a woman’s interest; a delay of two days lowers it, and the only reliable thing a delay buys is a certain amount of thought, which is not the same as approval and is obtainable by better means. Ambiguity about a man’s other women is worse than neutral: the copying effect that appears to license it turns out, in meta-analysis, to be about six per cent, to disagree with itself across studies, and to depend on the woman he is with being identifiable—while the evidence on sexual history, replicated across eleven countries with no meaningful double standard, says that a man who appears to be choosing widely is judged worse, not better. And on the third proposition, the one about competition and ambition, the honest verdict is that nobody has run the study. Women compete, and competition drives self-enhancement, and both are well measured; but every measurement was taken by manipulating the market, and none by manipulating one man.

What survives, across all of it, is smaller than the folk theory and older. The one classic result in the hard-to-get literature is Walster’s, and it is about selectivity: the person who could be elsewhere and is here. Birnbaum and Reis found the same good—perceived mate value—being produced by close attention rather than by its withdrawal, and more reliably in women than in men. Both point at the same thing, which is that what is being read is not availability but discrimination: evidence of a judgement, made by someone whose judgement is worth something, in your favour. A man who withholds contact is not sending that signal. He is sending no signal, and hoping it will be mistaken for one.

The limits of all this should be stated plainly, because they are severe. Nearly every study here rates a hypothetical person once, from a photograph or a profile or a vignette; the samples are overwhelmingly North American, British, student, or drawn from online panels; the framing is heterosexual almost throughout, because that is very largely who was sampled. Several of the load-bearing results are small and old—forty-seven undergraduates, thirty-five single women looking at one photograph, an experiment from 1973 whose subjects were men. Nobody has followed real people through real months, which is the only timescale on which the folk theory makes its actual claim. The strongest single sentence the evidence supports is unglamorous and worth having anyway: a woman who is written to the next morning wants to see him again more than one who is made to wait two days, and the reason is that she thinks he likes her.

Notes on Sources

Teichmann, L., Petrowsky, H. M., Boecker, L., Soliman, M., & Loschelder, D. D. (2026). How the timing of texting triggers romantic interest after the first date: a curvilinear U-shaped effect and its underlying mechanisms. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 43(2), 570–593. Pre-study N = 100; main experiment N = 543. Source of every figure in Part I and of Fig. 1.

Whitchurch, E. R., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2011). “He loves me, he loves me not . . .”: uncertainty can increase romantic attraction. Psychological Science, 22, 172–175. N = 47.† (Single small sample; the authors’ own mediation interval did not exclude zero.)

Richards, B. J. (2013). Target-Uncertainty and Initial Romantic Attraction: For Whom is the Unknown More Alluring than the Known? Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University.† (Unpublished and not peer-reviewed; cited only for the conceptual replication failure it reports, and for the surviving association between wondering and attraction.)

Walster, E. C., Walster, G. W., Piliavin, J. A., & Schmidt, L. (1973). “Playing hard to get”: understanding an elusive phenomenon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 113–121. Five null experiments; the sixth supported the selectively hard-to-get target, with male subjects.

Dai, X., Dong, P., & Jia, J. S. (2014). When does playing hard to get increase romantic attraction? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 521–526.

Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670–679. Cited for the wanting/liking dissociation only; its subject is addiction, not courtship.

Hill, S. E., & Buss, D. M. (2008). The mere presence of opposite-sex others on judgments of sexual and romantic desirability: opposite effects for men and women. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Study 1 N = 847; Study 2 N = 627.

Gouda-Vossos, A., Nakagawa, S., Dixson, B. J. W., & Brooks, R. C. (2018). Mate choice copying in humans: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 4, 364–386. Eighteen studies, 3,040 responses. Source of the 6.01 per cent, the 3.3 per cent correction, the heterogeneity figures, and Fig. 3. Uller, T., & Johansson, L. C. (2003). Human mate choice and the wedding ring effect: are married men more attractive? Human Nature, 14(3), 267–276.

Parker, J., & Burkley, M. (2009). Who’s chasing whom? The impact of gender and relationship status on mate poaching. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1016–1019. N = 184, of whom thirty-five single women.† (One stimulus photograph, by the authors’ own account; cells of seventeen or eighteen.) Bressan, P., & Stranieri, D. (2008). The best men are (not always) already taken. Psychological Science, 19, 145–151 — the opposite participant-status pattern.† (Cycle-phase logic; cf. Jones, B. C., et al., 2018, Psychological Science, finding no compelling evidence that masculinity preferences track hormonal status.)

Stewart-Williams, S., Butler, C. A., & Thomas, A. G. (2017). Sexual history and present attractiveness: people want a mate with a bit of a past, but not too much. The Journal of Sex Research, 54(9), 1097–1105. N = 188. Source of Fig. 4.

Thomas, A. G., et al., with Stewart-Williams, S. (2025). Sexual partner number and distribution over time affect long-term partner evaluation: evidence from 11 countries across 5 continents. Scientific Reports. Reported here at abstract level: the full text was behind a publisher gateway, so the sample size, which appears only in secondary coverage, is deliberately not stated in the essay.

Schmitt, D. P., & Buss, D. M. (2001). Human mate poaching. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Schmitt, D. P., et al. (2004), across fifty-three nations.† (Prevalence disputed by Davies, A. P. C., Shackelford, T. K., & Hass, R. G., 2007, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(5), 702–716, on definitional grounds.)

Birnbaum, G. E., & Reis, H. T. (2012). When does responsiveness pique sexual interest? Attachment and sexual desire in initial acquaintanceships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 946–958. Birnbaum, G. E., Ein-Dor, T., Reis, H. T., & Segal, N. (2014). Why do men prefer nice women? PSPB. Birnbaum, G. E., Reis, H. T., et al. (2016). Intimately connected: the importance of partner responsiveness for experiencing sexual desire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(4).

Navarro, R., Larrañaga, E., Yubero, S., & Víllora, B. (2020). Psychological correlates of ghosting and breadcrumbing experiences: a preliminary study among adults. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(3), 1116. N = 626; cross-sectional and self-reported, as the text says.

Buss, D. M. (1988). The evolution of human intrasexual competition: tactics of mate attraction. JPSP. Buss, D. M., & Dedden, L. A. (1990). Derogation of competitors. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7, 395–422. Vaillancourt, T., & Sharma, A. (2011). Intolerance of sexy peers: intrasexual competition among women. Aggressive Behavior, 37, 569–577.

Wang, X., Chen, H., Chen, Z., & Yang, Y. (2021). Women’s intrasexual competition results in beautification. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(5), 648–657. Durante, K. M., Griskevicius, V., Simpson, J. A., Cantú, S. M., & Tybur, J. M. (2012). Sex ratio and women’s career choice. JPSP.† (Primed-scenario designs, from the research programme whose ovulatory-shift findings have fared worst under replication.)

Jonason, P. K., & Li, N. P. (2013). Playing hard-to-get: manipulating one’s perceived availability as a mate. European Journal of Personality, 27(5), 458–469. Cited only for the existence and cataloguing of the tactic; the directional results of its later studies could not be verified against the full text and are not used.

† marks findings that are contested, weakened by replication attempts, drawn from unpublished work, or debated at the level of definition. Figures 2 and 4 are qualitative: the shapes are the cited authors’, the values are not plotted. Figures 1 and 3 draw published values and name the study in the caption. Part VIII is an argument from market structure, not a measurement; no study of the tactic across New York social settings was found.

Drafted with AI (Claude, Anthropic) as a private research synthesis, August 22, 2026; sources above are real publications, contested science is flagged rather than smoothed, and the one study the argument most needed turned out not to exist. Set, with affection and without affiliation, in the manner of a certain Manhattan weekly.New York revision drafted with AI on October 12, 2026; editorial review pending. ◆ ◆ ◆