Same Flirting Technique In Different Countries

First of all, while some signals are different, many are the same from culture to culture. We borrow body language from other cultures just as we borrow words. The movies are the greatest source of cross-cultural body language borrowing.

Second, your flirting signal worked in France because it is a part of French body language. The gesture you used is one compounded of eye and eyebrow movements combined with a smile. In doing it, the eyebrows are jerked upward for about one-sixth of a second—so small a time that its impact is subliminal—and the glance is given from the corner of the eye. It’s a simple greeting, a look that in essence says “hello!” then slides away before it can be answered.

The accompanying smile, of course, does a great deal. It says you’re interested and receptive, and it invites the man to take the initiative. In tests in primitive tribes in various parts of the world, the smile was found to be the only universal body language signal, and the ability to smile is undoubtedly inherited. We never have to learn how to do it. We’re born with the knowledge.

The greeting with the eyes, the flirting glance, is another matter. Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a German behavioral scientist, used cameras and mirrorlike attachments that permitted him to film people all over the world without their knowledge. With each picture, he wrote down the social context in which the filmed incident occurred.

Comparing his films, he found that among the most different people in the world, Balinese, Papuans, French, and Waika Indians, a rapid raising and lowering of the eyebrows accompanied by a smile and often a nod was used as a friendly flirting gesture—the same sort of gesture you describe. It worked for you in the States and in France, too. Eibl-Eibesfeldt found that it works all over the world.

He likens this flirting glance to one of the gestures passed down from “an ancient evolutionary inheritance.” Other inherited gestures, according to this German behaviorist, are rotating our arms inward and raising our shoulders when we’re threatened, pulling the corners of our mouths down when we’re angry, exposing upper canine teeth which are no longer large enough to be dangerous when we’re annoyed, and, in women, lowering the eyelids and head as they look away. This, he feels is an evolutionary remnant of the animal’s flight reaction.

These findings of hereditary signals in our body language lexicon contradict the idea that only the smile is inherited, but, as with any new science, the final word is still not in. Now genetics has the edge. Further research may give it back to the environment.