By Gemma Simpson, 13 November 2006 16:15
NEWS
Forget the cheesy chat-up lines, flash car or dodgy dancing, men are now whipping out their mobiles to attract the ladies, research from Sheffield Hallam University reveals.
The research also found men actively display their phones more than women in social situations to look important and popular and also to show off to male peers.
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Dr Simeon Yates, director of the Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam who headed up the research, told silicon.com the situation is "much more complicated and more to do with how we use the phones".
Yates said men might fiddle with mobiles because they don't have handbags or anywhere else to store them and the phones can also act as a point of conversation with one's peers. "But they could just be showing off," he added.
Yates said both men and women will try to 'maintain face' in same sex groups by checking caller IDs - with women double checking an intimate call isn't incoming and blokes worried it could be their mums on the other end of the line.
The two-year study observed men and women in various public locations including restaurants, bars and coffee shops.
Yates has also completed research on how the different sexes text each other, finding that women write texts to other women that are twice as long as male-to-male text correspondence.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
WHAT!*+* - these are my taxes that are being wasted. How can anyone get funding for such a crap piece of research?
Everyone already knows that women communicate more than men and that socially inadequate people fiddle and posture. The author could have cited 3 previously published papers - probably from the 1930s, saved paper and our taxes.
2. Roger Ash
Hard to decide which is more sad, a bloke who thinks his mobile makes him sexy, or a women who is attracted to him!
3. Norm Bartlett
"...finding that women write texts to other women that are twice as long as male-to-male text correspondence".
Well, there is a surprise!
4. Michael Furey
On the quality and veracity of research undertaken by the Sheffield Hallam group, closer analysis by other academics (who blog) is not so complementary:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002649.html
This does seem to be pretty worthless stuff. And as about as complex an analysis as that undertaken by their expermental subjects down the pub.
Sad
5. Alastair Warren
OK. Calm down.
It't obvious that this is a piece of work intended to attract free marketing for the University. Don't many Universities chase headlines and have a quota for the number of papers that must be produced per academic year?
The only thing this Country now manufactures is press releases.
It's no different from the way the Govt. communicate to us, though admittedly they also get their grubby mitts in our pockets. And shortly our homes.
But it does perhaps explain why I don't have a life, or a girlfriend or wife. I don't have a mobile phone.
6. Max Cameron
This is funny to see. We actually built an ice-breaker app for the iPhone that lets you customize horoscopes so you can "predict" meeting that beautiful girl across the room. I guess this is round two?