While perusing jezebel, I found a link to a fascinating study (thanks, girls!) that explains a phenomenon many men have experienced and complain about.
Over and over we hear from men that being nice, helpful and gracious only leads to scorn and abuse from women. On the other hand, for a certain class of woman, being surly and uncooperative leads to a much more positive response. This is perhaps the basis of the “neg” that is one of the mainstays of the pick up artist’s arsenal.
Finally, it appears that we have scientific confirmation of this phenomenon.
In a cognitive research experiment, a scientist asked freshman and sophomore college girls to participate in an exercise with their boyfriends. These were their instructions:
I would like you to prepare and deliver a four-minute talk. This talk will be videotaped and viewed later by several professors and graduate students…. It is extremely important that you do the best job that you can with this talk…. Your talk should be about the most difficult time in your life and how you coped with it.
They were given only five minutes, along with the help of their boyfriends, to prepare for the talk.
The women were rated as high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA), and they were further divided into those who were satisfied with their relationships and those who were not.
Furthermore, criteria were established by which to judge performance of the task at hand (boyfriends were also evaluated on this one):
Positive: Specific analysis of the problem, statement of feelings, asking for help, positive response to helper
Negative: Demanding help, criticizing, blaming, accusing, rejecting helper, whining, complaining
On Task: Staying focused on the assignment.
The result, although stunning to the researchers, would hardly be a surprise to many men:
The researchers could find no significant differences in behavior between the HSA and LSA women or their partners when the results were averaged across all participants in a group. But when each group was divided into subgroups of high- and low-satisfaction with their relationships, a significant difference was observed. Among high-satisfaction women, HSA women showed significantly more negative behavior than LSA women.
The researchers speculate that women who are satisfied with their relationships may fell more secure expressing their emotions when they are nervous or anxious. Since the LSA women probably weren’t as anxious about the speech, they had no reason to show any signs of discomfort, but HSA women did. HSA women who were unsatisfied with their relationships, on the other hand, were not comfortable sharing their anxiety with their partners.
And what about when the boyfriends behaved negatively? Again unexpectedly, HSA women behaved more negatively when their boyfriends behaved more positively to them. Among low-social anxiety women, there was no difference in behavior regardless of how their boyfriends behaved. Why did the highly-anxious women behave worse when their boyfriends were being nice?
After the results came in, the researchers speculated that the anxious women were more comfortable complaining when their boyfriends were more supportive, because they were not worried about getting a negative response in return.
But if comfort and security cause negative behavior, wouldn’t that suggest that the low anxiety women would be the biggest nags of all? I suspect that “high social anxiety” actually means something more like “high hormone level,” and the negative behavior toward complacent men may be a psycho-sexual rejection of less attractive mates.
Whatever the case, this strongly suggests that any man contemplating marriage should do his best to avoid a highly “anxious” woman. It also confirms the value and usefulness of the “neg” as a tool to gain a positive response from females of a certain psychological makeup.
18 responses so far ↓
1 miles // Jul 6, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Ive read a few books on Game, and what the neg does most is to make a woman self-conscious, and really preps her to be gamed further. Its “official definition” is that its a statement that disqualifies oneself from pursuing her while making a mild backhanded compliment or innocent smarting remark.
A neg can be a simple remark in a group of people directed toward one female that is completely private, “You need to blow your nose, here is my hankerchief”, or “You have some sleep/running mascara in your eye……here”. Both of these will make her (or anyone) self conscious about themselves. It can also of course be a classic neg that is audible to the whole group like “thats kind of cute, the way her nose wiggles when she talks just like a hamster at the mall pet store”, or “Ive seen great-big earrings like that in photos of my mom back in the 80′s, I didn’t know that old fashion had come back in style”. Then the player can just backturn and keep talking to others in her group about the subject at hand completely oblivious to her while he tells jokes or especially status-building stories while exhibiting alpha male physical behavior (open stances with arms at his sides as a non-defensive posture that only high status males in groups are usually comfortable with, resonant voice, and annonying casual familiarity toward any other alpha male in the group, as if he is used to being considered “high status” in all groups).
To use the hankercheif example:
Here is some hot chick, used to men kissing her ass and walking up and qualifying themselves to her, and some guy looks at her and squeezes his eyes, and leans over and politely tells her she needs to blow her nose like a child (Embarrassment!!!), and then like a white knight offers her a hankerchief to absolve the whole situation (her rescuer). But he then turns away from her ignoring her and starts talking to the rest of the group, both male and female while oblivious to her and DHV’s (Demonstrates Higher Value) by using status-building stories, body language, and behavior. After cleaning her nose and disposing of the tissue, she is there with a guy who is using psychology to present himself as an alpha male to the group but only giving her passing attention if any at all. Of course she feels like she has to “show him” that she is an impressive person, but when she does…………..he can just neg the living hell out of her with backhanded compliments and remarks that make her self-concious and that she has to *prove herself to him*, and that he is not very impressed with her as a response to her when she opens her mouth about anything, quickly turning his attention back to the group and keeps discussing the topic at hand—-that they were all discussing before, treating her as an outsider. There are plenty of things about a woman’s make-up, hairstyle, jewelry, clothing that are easy to “neg”—thus making her feel self-concious or slightly embarrased about.
As she feels like she has to “prove” that she is hot to you (so she can have the delightful pleasure of turning you down when you show interest), she will get more and more interested in coming up with stuff to knock you down a peg. The gamer just keeps DHV-ing, and where she is concerned DLV-ing (demonstrating lower value), qualifying her, and making her compete for his attention. He can then engage in “takeaways” where he shirks from any physical contact she tries to make (for instance if the touches his harm to get his attention so she can make a remark, he can raise an eyebrow with a “excuse me?” expression on his face just like you’d expect a hot chick to pull with some random guy who grabbed her arm.
Young pretty women are especially unused to being treated this way these days, like they are a seventh grade girl again trying to impress the starting quaterback who is in the ninth grade—-self concious and doubting that she is good enough to play in the big leagues, actually unsure if this guy even finds her attractive.
Its reverse psychology. Men have been browbeaten to be “nice guys” by the entertainment industry so much by never-ending parades of storylines that present women the victims of bad boys and insinuations that women are looking for “nice guys”. The same men get frustrated when they go overboard “being nice”, and getting ignored for their efforts. This is because women are hyper-status-oriented and men dont understand it.
If a pretty girl walks up to you and tells you that she thinks your are handsome and that you look nice and asks you would you like to talk and get to know each other becuase she is a nice girl and wants to meet a nice guy, you as a guy are simply delighted (where has this baby doll been all my life?). But few women (unfortunately) are like this in responding to a guy doing the same unless he is a 9 or a 10 in appearance and she is below that. Men who pull that same approach with women get shirked off if not openly smirked at. In bar etiquitte men have been taught (via TV and movies) to walk over to a woman and offer to buy her a drink/ ask her to dance in an act of supplication to her……………..where he is “admitting” that he is the one who is willing to face social rejection in front of a large crowd of people for the supposed honor of getting to speak/dance with her (he’s even willing to spend his hard-earned money to buy her a drink just to talk with her). She is thrust up on a pedestal in this act alone, and in the bar environment, where many men are willing to give her attention, buy her drinks, do silly dances with her, she imagines that her desirability is much much higher than what it is (and a hell of a lot higher than what it will be in just a few more years), so she cavalierly can dismiss men who are actually more attractive than herself with ease. The dark lighting, all her make-up war paint on, mascara on, fake boobs in push-up bras, fake tans, revealing clothing. Women have every advantage in presentation and environment in your average bar/club.
Negging them knocks them right out of that fantasy and makes her self-concious wondering what it is about her that is not getting to this particular guy. He is exhibiting the behaviors that evolutionary psychology has hardwired her to associate with a high-status male with resources and lots of options, so that she might actually have to compete with other women for him (what women love to do more than anything is vanquish ‘rival’ females for the attention of a sought-after male………………..they often resent each other much more than men do).
Its in the aforementioned social environement of our era that a neg is such a powerful psychological tool. Qualifying is probably even more so. That poon-attracting advice Roissy gives out has been backed up solidly in the four books Ive read on the subject. Men can use language to “frame” the interactions and “box-in” the females responses and with time almost force them to get “in the mood”. Its using psychology as a weapon, and its very effective.
2 Puma // Jul 6, 2009 at 4:14 pm
It’s a strange feedback loop.
A. Boyfriend Treats Her Bad:
1. He must be high-status male with options.
2. She is with him.
3. Therefore she must have decent/high market value.
4. All is good.
B. Boyfriend Treats Her Nice:
1. He must be a low-status male with no options, and must be afraid of losing her.
2. She is stuck with a loser.
3. She must have low-market value. She must be stuck in a bad deal.
4. She is Miserable.
3 Gunlingergregi // Jul 6, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Nice job Welmer.
Puma simple but elagent.
4 Returning Reader // Jul 7, 2009 at 5:16 am
Welmer, on the job. Good stuff.
5 Justin // Jul 7, 2009 at 9:17 am
I don’t think the results support what you think.
The study shows: among women who were highly satisfied and highly anxious, more negativity occurred than among women who were highly satisfied but not anxious. What is the surprise here? Highly stressed people are more negative.
As for the second “surprising” result, this is not big news, is it? When you put up with negative bullshit, you get more of it. Telling your woman to shut up and stop bitching often gets her to do just that. It’s just like the old scenario we’ve all seen, smacking some hysterical woman across the face to get her to calm down.
Thus study has nothing to do with neg, qualifying, or psycho-social rejection. I think too many PUA wannabes are quick to interpret any data as an excuse to unleash their inner asshole on women.
Instead of self-validating PUA fantasies, let’s look at the flip side of the study. Among women who were not anxious, there was no increase in negativity, regardless of bf behavior. Seems to me this study proves that neg is mainly useless.
Is this not common sense that we already knew: you have to be a stronger man to handle a more emotional woman. This is what satisfied women do: they rely on their man for emotional stability and guidance. The high-stress but low-satisfaction women complained less, no surprise there, as she is probably unsatisfied because her man has told her to STFU in the past and doesn’t want to put up with her histrionics. So naturally she is not as expressive as her satisfied sister, who knows that her man is there to support her in her emotionally trying times.
This is what strong men do with their emotional gfs: they let them express, then demonstrating their own support, then reign them in and don’t let them get carried away.
This validates that traditional model of male compassionate strength and stability, not the pathetic excuse for dishonesty and manipulative behavior known as PUA gaming.
6 Deansdale // Jul 8, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Miles, excellent summary. What are those 4 books you mentioned?
Justin, what’s your problem with PUAs? You seem to hate them. I guess you might be a ‘natural’ who does not see or understand why anybody needs to learn this stuff. It may be a shocking surprise to you but there are guys who have problems with women and PUA stuff actually helps them a lot.
Or you just might be an a**hole, I don’t know
7 Lukobe // Jul 8, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Being a PUA is fine if that’s what makes you happy and those are the sorts of women you’re going after.
8 Science Continues To Prove The Roissy Worldview « Roissy in DC // Jul 9, 2009 at 8:49 am
[...] the presses! Reader Welmer has a post up at his blog about a study demonstrating that negging women, particularly highly anxious (read: flaky, attractive and under 30) women, will [...]
9 sestamibi // Jul 9, 2009 at 11:04 am
Well then I guess the Cornelius Brothers were wrong.
10 miles // Jul 9, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Deansdale,
The Mystery Method is the book I’d recommend that introduces a system of nomenclature to describe group social dynamics and attraction from a rather sciency perspective. There was a free-MM-Ebook out there at one time, I dont know if thats still out there, but the physical book is assuredly still for sale on Amazon.
Thats the one to read. Ive read others, but the MM is the one that really stands out. It doesn’t have “example” situations much, probably so women can’t read it and remember the examples and explain it to each other. Its written in a way that only those who really want to know will truly grasp it.
I looked into PUA-”stuff” after getting interested in the subject after reading an online article about it. A magazine writer went to a club with Neil Strauss and a few other professional PUA’s, and did the things they told him to do. He was very dissapointed that it worked as well as it did, and had women “too pretty for him” really interested in him. The guy did NOT like “game”, but admitted that it worked. It was an English writer. I dont have the link, but I decided to read up on it after that as an intellectual excercise. Hitting a link once and winding up on Roissy’s blog (roissy.wordpress.com) also introduced me more to the fact that lots of men were “practicing” how to meet and seduce women by using various “methods” to drive the female’s moods from A to B to C to D, and to “build” attraction, build comfort, and build intimacy in very precise steps. I was familiar with “mood scams” and somewhat familiar with some sales psychology, but this was more.
So I finally read the Mystery Method, and was impressed with it. I read a few more books (Ive tried in the past few years to stop reading fiction and only read non-fiction, so I learn useful stuff when I read) on the subject out of intellectual curiosity. Kevin Hogan’s “Irresistable Attraction” and Tony Clink’s “Layguide” also stood out. Ive read a couple of more………one was called Alpha-Male-Something-Or-Other, and one was Roosh V’s, “Bang”. Both had useful information and some breakdowns of these processes from meeting and attracting all the way to getting intimate.
“Game” uses psychology quite a bit. Roissy has written a bunch of good stuff for free that one could access on his blog by simply going through his archives. Qualifying, eliciting values, negs, takeaways, framing interactions, spotting flakes and sluts, intensifying moods, reading behaviors, presentation are things he has blogged about and are in his archived posts that you can go through. He’s obvioiusly read about this stuff a good deal and like Roosh, has used it successfully in real life.
Ive also read some of the archived posts (I dont have the link on me) one night of Tyler Durden, another well known PUA. He had a lot of good information. David DeAngelo is a PUA that others have acclaimed.
Im not a PUA personally, as Im pretty happy with what I have going on, but was interested in learing about it from the psychological perspective—-telling why women do the seemingly bizarre things they sometimes do (like dating guys who are obvious losers and ignoring sometimes wonderful, decent men). Reading about game over a month or so really lets one kind of understand why several behavorial cues set off female’s psychological subconcious attraction buttons because some men come off as “alpha” males……..and women are hardwired to find them attractive even when they aren’t conventionally good-looking, etc.
Its useful stuff to read in my opinion because it helps you understand half of the people on this earth and what attracts them and why they will rationalize some poor decision making on thier own part.
I hope game can help men become more confident and better actors in the world out there, and can help them attract wives and marry sooner as Im worried about the West’s below-replacement birthrates. I also hope it can help even the field out there between the sexes again.
Hope this helps, have a great weekend, M
11 Justin // Jul 10, 2009 at 8:44 am
Deansdale, I dislike PUA gaming because it represents everything that is wrong with us.
Contemplate this, lad: taking advantage of young women’s bad judgement and emotion weakness is WRONG.
Whatever it takes to get laid, right? It’s just the behavior of a cad, elevated to a psychological science.
Gaming is just like strippers, escorts, and Girls Gone Wild: sounds great as long as you are a single guy. Tell me how you feel about it after you are raising daughters.
12 miles // Jul 10, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Justin,
Lots of men who major in things like engineering, physics, biology, microbiology, accounting, and other useful, necessary, wealth-building, civilization-building subjects and careers find themselves blanked beyond belief out at the bars when they start to go look for a wife to start their family with. These same men are amazed that thugs with tons of tattoes and peircings and obviously (to other men) fake ‘tough guy’ personas have women damn near fighting over them, while fairly nice-looking, polite, civilized, erudite, much-higher earning guys get treated like dirt by the same females.
Women no longer have to make wise choices in mating choices Justin. Society will take taxes from you and your family to pay for Jane Slut and her three out-of-wedlock kids she had with three different bikers, give her a Sec8 house, give her foodstamps, pay for her to go to school because she is a single mom, and mandate she be hired to fufill quotas with several large companies all while making her very hard to fire (lawsuits). Society has paved a golden road for single females with children.
These women no longer have to make wise choices and marry law-abiding “nice guys”. They can fufill their “gina tingles” and chase Anti-Hero-like men (think Marlon Brando in the Wild One, unemployed loser-extrodinnaire in a motorcycle gang). Women are GIVEN the kids when divorcing nice guys these days, and GIVEN a huge amount of their former nice-guy-husband’s income for almost two decades, GIVEN half his retirement, and in many cases GIVEN alimony from him for longer than that, and he is often made to pay off her car and provide her with car insurance until she is working on her own. All of this so she can run off with a ponytailed thug.
Men can use “Game” in marriage to make her “gina tingle” for him. Its not pretty, and in fact I was very very against game (combat reverse psychology is what it really is) when I first read of it. However, I have over 10 friends and aquaintances who have been harmed financially badly in divorces that they didn’t want. One has been screwed over twice. These guys have lost a lot of what theyve earned over the first 15-20 years of their working lives because their wives found scuzzy-guys excited them more than their faithful hardworking husbands and attentive fathers of their children. If these men had constantly negged, qualified, performed some takeaways, and did a little flirting right in front of these former ex-wives, and engaged in some tactical “not-nice-guy” behavior, these women might have never have left.
It sucks, but in the West, men are in a precarious marital-legal position from the start, and over the next two generations we will begin to see dsytopic results civilizationally speaking if we cant get it turned around.
A guy can use game to find, woo, and win over a wife, and then use it to keep her married until the kids are grown. If used in this way it does not have to be a negative relationship technique. Not everybody has to use game like Roosh does.
13 Lukobe // Jul 11, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Why would you look for a wife at a bar, of all places?
14 Justin // Jul 13, 2009 at 11:39 am
Miles, I hear you and agree about the need for men to act more manly in their marriages. I just do not get the impression that gaming is used or presented as a marriage-building technique.
I think we are facing a generational problem. I’ll bet these nice guy friends of yours came from traditional homes (established during a generation when divorce was not possible) or from single mom homes. They did not see the model of dominant male in the house that keeps a marriage together. You and me know that the man has to be the alpha in his own house, I’m guessing they didn’t.
Frankly, you might as well advise men to make women scared of getting the shit beat out of them if they dare cheat. That would probably be just as effective as anything else. I guess that would qualify you as the alpha in your relationship, right?
Better yet, advance the practice and acceptance of private marriage contracts, to protect the innocent party in any divorce situation, which is the opposite of what no-fault does.
15 Conor Friedersdorf: A social conservative who just doesn’t get it « In Mala Fide // Jul 24, 2009 at 2:36 am
[...] married couples, you’ll note that they tease each other all the time. There’s even a scientific basis for negging women. The message is clear, guys: neg early and neg often. I’ve never seen anyone do [...]
16 All You Do Is Neg, Neg, Neg « Around The Sphere // Aug 8, 2009 at 12:04 pm
[...] lovers and married couples, you’ll note that they tease each other all the time. There’s even a scientific basis for negging women. The message is clear, guys: neg early and neg [...]
17 z.g. // Aug 15, 2009 at 8:37 am
Justin:
Deansdale, I dislike PUA gaming because it represents everything that is wrong with us.
Contemplate this, lad: taking advantage of young women’s bad judgement and emotion weakness is WRONG.
The need for pua may be representing what is wrong with society, but not the pua itself.
Women have shown they will punish the good guys of the society by ignoring them in their peak years and rewarding mostly destructive behavior.
Taking advantage of young women’s bad judgement?
You shitting me?
Women have made their choice. Nobody took advantage of that.
When the girls in my highschool (in a patriarchal society) one after the other jumped all over the three year older basketball jock, and ignored all the ther dudes, they made their choice.
Look at the dvds of pua seminars. What you see is men from all groups. ALL PRODUCTIVE groups who have been fucked over, ignored by women.
What would be most surprising to an ignorant observer would be the amount of really good looking men over there, trying to understand, trying to learn.
What, so because men will not take advantage of the already made bad choices of women, they will stand by the side and enjoy getting fucked over?
No. Just as women do not owe men sex, as some put it (collectively speaking I disagree, individually speaking I agree),
Men do not owe women good behavior, respect etc anymore, as it is unfounded.
Collectively, women have fucked themselves to worhtlessness.
Few women I found who are long term material, but they are paying the price of the behaviors of their sisters, in which many men my age, including me, are reluctant to commit anymore.
Miles, I hear you and agree about the need for men to act more manly in their marriages.
One has to remember,
There are two definitions of man.
By men.
By women.
Replacing acting manly with alpha,
We get two definitions of alpha.
Male definition: Leader of the pack. Protective. Risk taking. The “Man”
Female definition: Wanted/chosen by other women. Rest is unimportant. “Ooooh he is popular”
So acting manly in a marriage, may clash with her understanding, and you are screwed.
Does not pay off.
Game in itself, is not merely acting manly, it is a response to women’s faulty selection criteria, (i.e.: He ignores me. He must be wanted. I am wet) and the unnatural freedom given to them by birth control, std control, abortion, and social support for bastards,
Non which exists in nature
And everytime one accuses pua or bad behavior etc, I look at myself living in abundance, and then I look at some of my friends, who are wallowing in a desert of sexlessness (average joes and over), and yes, there is something wrong, and yes things will end bad,
But it was not the teachings of pick up, and female psychology that brought this.
It would actually help these guys.
18 sabril // Nov 28, 2009 at 7:21 pm
It’s one thing I’ve noticed over the years. Doing something nice for a girl you are interested in is the kiss of death. For example, suppose there is a hot girl at your office and you are interested in her. Suppose she asks if anyone has aspirine because her head is hurting. There is no open drugstore nearby. You just happen to have a full bottle of aspirine sitting in your desk.
Common sense, as well as your basic feeling of humanity would lead you to offer her some aspirine from your supply. However if you do it, you have just cut your chances of getting sex from her by about 90%.
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