Sexy science - Best babe magnet could be a hot friend who laughs at your jokes

Published on Wednesday 4 June 2008 21:27

Looking for love, but nobody paying you any attention? Research suggests the best way to achieve instant popularity is to surround yourself with fawning friends of the opposite sex.

WHAT is it with James Corden? He's 5ft 7in and 18 stone – hardly the dimensions of an Adonis, but he's a big hit with the girls, and now that the Gavin and Stacey star is rumoured to have got together with the lippy but luscious Lily Allen, he seems to have babes literally crawling all over him.

And then there's Rhys Ifans. That buttock-clenching skinnymalink who was Hugh Grant's sidekick in Notting Hill could hardly have set female pulses racing, but since beautiful Sienna Miller hooked up with him he's become a much more interesting proposition to many.

In his latest book, The Economic Naturalist, economist Robert Frank has a stab at explaining this strange phenomenon. He tells the story of a man who was having trouble finding a girlfriend. The man had a platonic relationship with a pretty woman who decided one evening to help her friend get some female attention. While they were in a bar she sat close to him, laughed at his jokes, loudly made arrange-ments to meet him again and then left. This seemed to get him noticed since, unusually for him, several women approached him in the course of the evening.

Frank points out that it's hard to tell whether someone's OK just by looking at him, but the fact that an attractive woman was giving close attention to the man and obviously knew him well was a clear signal that he was a "good guy" and worth giving a shot.

As it happens, science backs up this notion. Researchers studying a number of animal species have noticed that females are more likely to prefer males who are already paired with another female. It saves time and energy to let another female check out the goods first.

But we humans take this "mate-copying" to a more sophisticated level. Ben Jones of Aberdeen University and his colleagues found that not only do women take note of others' partner choices, but they seem to mimic other women's attitudes to men. They asked volunteers to look at photos of men paired with women who were either smiling at them or had a neutral expression. Men were rated as more attractive by female volunteers when they had a smiling partner – in spite of the fact that they were physically identical in both conditions.

It seemed that the women were picking up the cue from the smilers that they were with a "good guy".

In another recent piece of research, the same team showed that whether or not you pay attention to other people's partner choices may depend on the kind of relationship you yourself are looking for.

They presented 51 female and 35 male subjects with photos of men and women paired with good-looking or with less-attractive opposite-sex partners. Female subjects rated the men as more desirable when that man's partner was beautiful, and likewise, when a woman was pictured with a good-looking man, male subjects found the woman more attractive. The thinking here is that an attractive person is likely to be able to get a higher quality partner, and so it's worth taking note of their choices.

But inter-estingly, this effect wasn't seen when the subject was sussing out the man or woman as a potential short-term partner. If all we want is a fling, then we're going to be attracted to obvious, often physical characteristics that we can see for ourselves. For a long-term relationship though, we look for hidden qualities such as intelligence, kindness, and GSOH. In this case, it looks like we take our cues from others because they already know what the potential partner is like.

I can't help thinking, though, that part of a person's allure comes from the self-confidence they exude, and of course having the attention of an attractive lover increases our self-esteem no end. Confidence is one of the sexiest of human qualities while desperation sends us running a mile.

Corden is no shrinking violet and seems to be very secure about his appeal to ladies.

He said in an interview last year: "I actually learned quite quickly that women respond very well to confidence, charm and humour."

This is clearly a man who reckons he's got a lot to offer. I guess we'd have to ask Ms Allen.