A 50 percent chance he likes you can beat a 100 percent chance
Psychologists ran an experiment on liking that's bad news for anyone trying to seem interested on purpose.
In a 2010 study, researchers Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert showed college women Facebook profiles of men who'd supposedly already rated how much they liked each woman. One group was told the men liked them a lot. A second was told the men rated them average. A third was told, honestly, that they didn't know which one it was.
The first two groups behaved exactly as the textbook reciprocity principle predicts: people liked back more when told they were liked more. But the third group broke the pattern. Told nothing certain at all, they rated the men as most attractive, more than the women told the men liked them best. They also reported thinking about the men more than anyone else did.
The researchers' explanation: uncertainty keeps the mind working on an unsolved problem, and that mental rehearsal gets misread by the brain as attraction. It's close to the same mechanism a slot machine runs on, applied to a dating profile.
Which is a strange thing to know about your own mind the next time silence from someone starts feeling like a signal.