People who love to bring an element of play into their lives and relationships with others usually do not lack novels. Scientists have figured out the reasons for their success in romantic relationships.
Researchers from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) the results of his work in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences.
Previous research has shown that both men and women favor the personality trait of playfulness in a potential long-term partner. Playfulness in this case means a light, laid-back, carefree attitude to life, love for jokes, fun, improvisation.
It is believed that such a choice is justified from the point of view of evolution: men instinctively prefer flirtatious laughter, because this type of behavior is associated with youth, and therefore with fertility, and women unconsciously “sink” on frivolous jokers, since this type of behavior signals a lack of the man is aggressive.
Brazilian psychologists set out to find out how playfulness generally affects a person’s reproductive success, that is, the number of short-term and long-term romantic relationships during a lifetime. To do this, an online survey was conducted with the participation of more than a thousand Brazilians of both sexes, whose average age was 28 years.
Participants indicated how many short and long romances they had, and also underwent psychological testing, according to the results of which the researchers assessed the individual level of playfulness of each participant. At the same time, they identified four different aspects of this personal quality.
Types of playfulness
Playfulness towards others – in this case, a person enjoys the fact that he constantly introduces an element of the game into relationships with other people, thereby making these relationships more interesting for himself;
Frivolous playfulness – the tendency to perceive life as a game and not worry too much about the future;
Intellectual playfulness – enjoying “playing” with ideas and solving complex problems;
Eccentric playfulness – getting pleasure from strange situations, the desire to behave unpredictably, constantly surprise, confuse others in the course of daily communication.
As a result, it turned out that the men who scored the maximum number of points on the scale of “playfulness aimed at others” lead the most hectic personal lives. They turned out to have a lot of both short-term and long-term partners. As for women, among them, those who scored the maximum number of points on the “eccentric playfulness” scale enjoy the greatest success. At the same time, lovers of surprising others often start short-term rather than long-term romances.
“The results suggest that both sexes use playfulness to increase their chances of reproductive success, but do so in slightly different ways,” the researchers write.