Run Game Approaching

Cold approach myths, one by one

6 min read

Cold approach means starting a conversation with a stranger you're attracted to, in a place neither of you planned to meet. People argue about it loudly, and many of the arguments are built on personal stories. Here are six common claims, with what's documented, what isn't, and where the evidence stops.

One caution first. Very little research studies romantic approaches on the street. Most of what exists is about talking to strangers in general, or about how people rate opening lines. Where a study doesn't cover dating, this post says so.

Myth 1: "It always ends badly"

Many people expect a stranger to react coldly. A 2014 paper by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General tested that kind of expectation with commuters on trains and buses. People asked to talk with a nearby stranger reported a more positive ride than people told to keep to themselves, with no loss of productivity. Before the ride, people predicted that solitude would be nicer. The authors link this to underestimating how much others want to connect.

A separate 2018 paper (Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark, Psychological Science) found a "liking gap": after conversations, people underestimated how much their partner liked them. It held in lab pairs, dorm mates and a workshop.

Limits matter here. Neither study was about romantic approaches, and a commuter chat isn't a request for a number. They show that fear of a cold reception tends to be bigger than the reception itself. They don't show that a romantic approach goes well.

Myth 2: "It's always welcome" (the opposite claim)

The opposite claim treats an approach as welcome by default. The documented picture is more mixed. A 2018 nationally representative survey of 2,000 US adults, commissioned by Stop Street Harassment and run by GfK, found that 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men reported some form of sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime. That definition is broad and covers many settings, so it isn't a measure of polite hellos. It does explain why plenty of people are wary when a stranger approaches, and why some don't want approaches in public at all.

Both things are true at once: many people are happy to chat, and some aren't. Reading the person, keeping it short, and stopping when you get a no or a turned shoulder is the practical answer. Consent and respect in cold approach covers it.

Myth 3: "You need a great line"

Two bodies of evidence, both small and both about ratings rather than real outcomes.

In a 2006 study, Christopher Bale, Rory Morrison and Peter Caryl had 205 undergraduates (142 women, 63 men) rate 40 written scenarios of a man opening with a woman, judging whether she'd keep talking. Jokes, empty compliments and sexual references scored poorly. Openers signaling helpfulness, generosity, athleticism or culture scored well. Earlier work by Kleinke, Meeker and Staneski (1986), as summarized in one secondary write-up, found that both men and women preferred innocuous and direct lines to cute or flippant ones.

What that suggests: the content of an opener can matter, and clever tends to rate worse than simple. What it doesn't show is that any line changes outcomes in real life. Coaches who say the line barely matters are offering their experience, not a study. Openers that work has plain examples.

Myth 4: "It only works if you're good-looking"

No study found for this post tests that directly. The opener study above used text, so looks played no part, and the ratings still varied by what the man said. That's thin evidence in one direction.

Other claims you'll see online, such as a prop or a touch making a big difference, often trace back to field experiments by one French researcher, Nicolas Guéguen. In 2019 Times Higher Education reported that outside researchers questioned the data collection in one of his street studies (a guitar-case experiment with nearly 300 women), and that the university president referred him to an outside disciplinary committee. Guéguen did not respond to the article's request for comment. Those papers reported accepted phone-number requests ranging from roughly one in ten to about three in ten depending on the condition. Because the data in at least one of them was questioned, treat figures from this line of work with caution.

So the honest answer is that nobody has shown how much looks matter in street approaches, and none of the studies above separates looks from how someone carries themselves or what they say.

Myth 5: "There's a proven success rate"

You'll see numbers like "1 in 10" or "1 in 50" quoted as a fact. Those come from individual people's logs, video channels or the field studies above. They don't come from a representative sample, and they depend heavily on setting, how the approach is counted and who's counting. Infield videos explains why a filmed clip is a chosen edit, not a statistic. The only success rate worth knowing is your own, over a long enough run to mean something.

Myth 6: "In person is how people really meet" (and its mirror, "apps are the only way")

Both are claims about averages. A 2019 paper in PNAS by Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas and Sonia Hausen used a nationally representative 2017 US survey and found that meeting online had become the most common way heterosexual couples meet, overtaking introductions through friends around 2013. So approaching strangers is not the main route for most couples in that survey. It's one route among several, with real costs (nerves, rejection, time) and real advantages (no profile to build, immediate chemistry check). Online dating vs cold approach and social circle vs cold approach compare them side by side.

What's solid enough to act on

What to do next

  1. Pick one myth you believe and write down what would change your mind. Check it against what you actually see.
  2. Run a small test: 10 short conversations with strangers in friendly places (a class, a market, a run club) over two weeks. Count how many went better than you expected.
  3. Track your own numbers. For each approach, note the setting, how you opened and the outcome. Don't judge anything before 30 entries.
  4. Use one plain opener for the whole test, such as "Hi, I'm [name], I noticed [specific thing] and wanted to say hello." Change one thing at a time afterward.
  5. Set your stop rule in advance: a no, a short answer twice, or a turned body means a friendly goodbye and you walk.
  6. Start with cold approach for beginners if you haven't done a first week yet.

Run Game lets you log each approach as Success or Rejected with a note, which makes your own numbers easy to read after a few weeks.

If this is on your mind, choosing who to approach goes further.

Sources