Looking for love? Ask your crush for help
If you're looking for love, try asking for help from the object of your affections.
Researchers have found that people who seek assistance from potential love interests are seen as more attractive.
The researchers said that asking for help was a 'small act of reliance' that could 'foster intimacy'. However, it was important to do it in a certain way, they said, describing two types of help-seeking — 'autonomy-oriented' and 'dependency-oriented'.
Examples of autonomy-oriented help-seeking are when a person asks somebody to show them how to fix something — they are given knowledge or skills so that they can tackle the problem for themselves in the future.
With dependency-orientated help-seeking, however, the person will ask, 'Can you fix this for me?' instead.
It is this dependency-orientated help-seeking that makes people more appealing when they are looking for love, researchers from City University of Hong Kong and South China Normal University discovered. It also acts as a better signal that someone is interested.
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'The reason why asking for help can be very useful to initiate romantic interests is because interdependence is essential in close relationships,' the study's co-author, Professor Xijing Wang, from City University of Hong Kong, said.
'When we ask someone for help by having them solve a problem for us — dependency-oriented help-seeking, instead of just guiding us — we signal that we trust and want to rely on them.
'Such trust and reliance can be a strategic way to signal romantic interests. This happens because, similar to how we are attracted to people who appreciate us, those we ask for help often feel closer to us when we show that we rely on them.'
For the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the team carried out nine experiments involving 2,500 people from the UK, the US and China.
They found that the more someone was interested in finding a partner — what psychologists call 'mating motivation' — the more likely they were to use dependency-oriented help-seeking, rather than the autonomy-seeking kind. They also felt a stronger attraction to those who asked for this kind of help from them.
People in couples also felt that strangers who approached their partners for dependency-oriented help were more likely to try and steal them and felt more jealous, compared to when strangers asked for autonomy-oriented help instead. The results were the same for men and women.
'Our analysis revealed no gender differences, indicating that dependency-oriented help-seeking is effective for both men and women during the romantic initiation stage,' Wang said.
However, using a similar strategy to build trust with colleagues at work is not a good idea, she warned. 'Competence is one of the most critical traits valued in a professional environment, and using dependency-oriented help-seeking to convey reliance and trust [at work] could potentially backfire.'
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