What motivates a person to play hard to get? That's what Adelphi graduate student in psychology Kirby Weinberg set out to discover.
What motivates a person to play hard to get? That’s what Adelphi graduate student in psychology Kirby Weinberg set out to discover. Her newly published dissertation offers some well-researched answers, ones that caught the attention of Psychology Today, which declared it “perhaps the first study to investigate the psychological factors that predispose people to play hard to get.”
Weinberg found that, as many may have suspected, playing psychological games is a defense mechanism that protects daters from anxiety and fear of rejection; it can also be a sign of narcissistic entitlement. She tested these notions using a complex “mind-set–priming” technique, having test subjects read statements about relationships designed to influence their answers to questions that followed. Her findings showed that, even after being primed to do the opposite, healthy subjects and those who say they play hard to get remained unmoved.
Learn more by reading the Psychology Today article.
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