Is Cold-Approaching Women a Waste of Time for Men?

I have always wondered why it is so hard to find a study on the validity of cold approaching, despite the act being a catalyst for dating and relationships.

And it’s not because I haven’t tried; I have searched far and wide to no avail.

I find that when researchers tackle the topic, it’s usually from the perspective of pickup lines or speed dating, just never the actual act of approaching a stranger. That is, until now.

It all happened by accident while watching an episode of the Chris Williamson podcast. In it, he was interviewing evolutionary psychologist Professor Steve Stewart-Williams, and partway through a segment on gender preferences, a study by Clark and Hatfield came up. It was about how men and women respond when approached for romance.

Being that I don’t like to take anything I hear online at face value, I sought out the study to read it for myself, and voilà, that’s how I came to discover my first study on cold approaching.

What the research actually shows

So the original study is from the 1980s — an odd choice given how the professor talked about it as if it were current — but that’s neither here nor there.

The study consisted of 192 college students, split equally between men and women. And it involved five women and four men walking around campus asking the following question:

“I noticed you around the place lately, and I find you very attractive, and I was wondering if you would like to…” and they would finish that sentence with one of three prompts:

1. Go out with me tonight.
2. Come up to my room.
3. Have sex with me.

…

Men would ask women, and women would ask men, with each of the nine confederates going through the trifecta of questions at different points in time.

Clark and Hatfield discovered that for the first question, there wasn’t much of a difference between the genders. There was a 50/50 likelihood that men and women would say yes.

The gender gap only became pronounced on the other two questions.

When women asked, “Would you like to come to my room?” 69% of men said yes. When men asked the same, only 6% of women felt the same.

The sex question had an even bigger gap, if we can even call it that.

75% of men said yes, while zero women agreed to the kind gesture.

Even more telling, of the 25% of men who said no, a portion of them refused not because they didn’t want to get freaky; it was mostly due to time constraints, with some even asking to postpone the sexual rendezvous due to them having to meet their fiancée soon. Women, on the other hand, made no such excuses; in fact, a good portion were straight-up offended by the question.

Before you dismiss the findings as dated, there have actually been replication studies conducted over the years, specifically in 2010 and 2015.

All of them corroborate Clark and Hatfield in one specific way: the more sexually explicit the request, the higher the odds of women saying no.

A conclusion, I assume, won’t come as a surprise to most of you. It’s pretty common knowledge by now that women are generally apprehensive about having sex with random strangers. After all, they have safety, pregnancy, and societal concerns to contend with.

When it comes to men, however, the story is a bit different. While they were generally more likely to say yes to all three questions compared to women, they still did so at a lower rate in the 2010 and 2015 studies. The latter was especially notable because it was the only one to show a reversal, where more men said yes to dates than to sex.

It really does paint a picture of young men becoming less accepting of romantic advances from the opposite sex over time, at least insofar as these specific studies are concerned.

A look at the current landscape

There is another replication study from 2024 that I discovered. It’s by far the most recent, so the findings are more relevant to the current dating landscape.

The study consists of two experiments with a one-year gap: the first had 96 participants (48 female, 48 male) and the second had 144 participants (72 female, 72 male). Both utilized the same format as Clark and Hatfield, right down to the trio of questions.

To say the results were quite something would be an understatement.

Yes, men were still more likely to accept women’s proposals regardless of the question in both experiments. However, in the first, the overall rate at which men said yes was 27% compared to just 4% for women. And if they were single, the numbers jumped to 55% for men and 11% for women.

In the second experiment, things improved a bit. Overall, 40% of men said yes compared to 14% of women. And if they were single, the number went up 79% for men versus 32% for women.

Keep in mind, these are overall percentages, meaning researchers aggregate the results from all the questions to calculate a single figure.

Is cold approaching a waste of time?

If you are a woman, pretty much the world is your oyster. Regardless of what you ask, whether a date, sex, or anything in between, you are guaranteed success. This fact has remained consistent over time.

If you are a man, the situation is a bit more complicated. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say men should never approach women in public.

That’s not to say women haven’t become more averse to being approached by strangers these days… social media narratives about safety scares are rife, so it’s fitting to see more of them say no. Plus, pickup artists recording women without their knowledge and then gloating about it online hasn’t been helping either.

All I’m saying is that it pays to put these studies into perspective.

Even with the stiff one-liners, a good portion of women did agree to go on a date. Imagine how much better the odds would be had the men spent a couple of minutes rapport building before asking them out. I’m sure the results would have been more positive.