A major function of a dance floor is to facilitate finding and attracting partners. When we meet new potential friends and lovers we usually want to learn a lot about them quickly in order to determine whether they are people want to bond with and to suss out their intentions towards us. Given how much bars, clubs and dance floors are used to meet new people, it is surprising that they are often poorly lit, crowded and noisy to the point where conversation is impossible. Strobe lights seem purpose built to ration what little we can see of others. This all makes it harder to work out whether another person is attractive to us or not, and to suss out how they feel about us. In other words, a club would be a terrible place to conduct a job interview. Why design them this way when a major purpose of dancing in the first place is in assisting informed mate selection.
Others can’t assess you as closely either. Of course, if you’ve got something to hide this is great, but if your concealed traits are positive this is no good at all. Shouldn’t such an environment attract an undesirable number of people with features they’d like to hide?
Dancing can occur in well lit, low volume, spacious locales, so why the switch to environments that mask our signals?
Such an environment does have the upside of making it possible to inconspicuously approach others; the rest of the dance floor can’t clearly see who you are approach, or if you are rejected, so each approach carries a smaller reputational risk. Perhaps it’s because we drink and spend more when we can’t have conversations, and enough people a just out with familiar friends? Perhaps we specifically want to deaden our standards? The less we know about the other person the more likely we are to find them acceptable partners for a single night at least. Perhaps drunk people are so transparent we hardly need the assistance of good lighting?
What do you think?
Tagged: dancing, mate selection, sex, signalling Image may be NSFW.
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