'Manspreading' can indeed win you her love on first date

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New York: While body language and how you present yourself on the first date is vital to spark love, new research suggests that “manspreading” - sitting in an “expansive or open posture” - is actually what will win you her love and attention for sure.

According to Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk, an expert in human behaviour from the University of California-Berkeley, an “expansive posture” is actually an “enlargement of the amount of space that a person is occupying.”

The team found that adopting an “expansive posture” in profile photos makes other users twice as likely to rate a person as attractive, smithsonianmag.com reported. 

This goes opposite for a photo where the man is pictured with his arms and legs close to his torso. 

“In general, we see an enlargement of the amount of space that a person is occupying, in contrast to contractive postures with arms and legs held close to the torso,” said Vacharkulksemsuk in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To reach this conclusion, the team analysed footage of 144 speed dates event at Northwestern University involving 12 men and 12 women who interacted for four minutes at a time.

The participants reported whether they will pursue future romantic relationships with any of their dates.

In a second experiment using a mobile dating application. nearly 3,000 respondents responded “yes” or “no” to individual profiles - a photograph accompanied by the user's first name and age. 

Two profiles were created for each person, one in which they appeared with “expansive open postures” and one with contacted postures, the report added. 

Researchers used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (artificial intelligence bot) to recruit 853 participants to complete a survey based on one of 12 photo collages of the contracted and expanded profile images.

The results were similar across all of the platforms and, perhaps surprisingly, among men and women as well. 

“It appears that both can benefit from having a little bit of expansiveness,” Vacharkulksemsuk added. 

“Within milliseconds, we can pick up a suite of information about a person, with social dominance and hierarchical standing being one of those things,” she noted.