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Why the bad boy pull fades: what the research says

6 min read

The "bad boy" idea says confident, edgy, unreliable men get the attention, while considerate ones get friendship. Some of that has a basis in research, and some of it doesn't survive a close look. The honest answer depends on what you mean by "bad boy", how long the relationship lasts, and who you ask.

One note before the studies. "Bad boy" isn't a scientific category, so researchers use stand-ins: dominance, being nice or not, narcissism, or the "Dark Triad" (narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism). Every finding below is an average across a group of participants, and none of it predicts what one person will choose.

What a few studies on niceness and dominance found

In a 1995 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Lauri Jensen-Campbell, William Graziano and Stephen West ran three studies (348 participants in total) on women's attraction to men. In the first, men who were prosocial (helpful, considerate) were rated as more physically and sexually attractive, more socially desirable and more desirable as dates than men who weren't. Dominant men were no more attractive than low-dominance men. In the later studies, attraction depended on dominance and prosocial tendencies together, and the authors report that dominance alone didn't increase any form of attraction they measured. The abstract doesn't describe who the participants were, and the first study found no interaction between the two traits while the later ones did, so this is a mixed picture.

A 2003 study in Sex Roles by Geoffrey Urbaniak and Peter Kilmann, as summarized by PsyPost, used hypothetical dating-show scripts with female college students (48 in one experiment, 194 in another). A "nice" contestant was chosen most often, then a middle one, then a "jerk". Niceness predicted choice for a marriage partner and a steady boyfriend, and most women rejected an attractive jerk. For casual sex, attractiveness mattered more than niceness. The authors suggested that persistence might let some jerks succeed, but that wasn't tested. These were hypothetical choices from a script, and the participants were all women in their late teens or early twenties.

An older, broader pattern is consistent with these. In Buss and Barnes's 1986 study, 100 unmarried undergraduates ranked 13 traits for someone they might marry, and "kind and understanding" ranked first. In their married-couples sample (184 people) the traits rated highest included considerate, honest and dependable. That's self-reported, in two US samples.

What studies on dark traits found

Here the research is less tidy. A 2016 speed-dating study by Emanuel Jauk and colleagues (90 heterosexual participants, 46 women and 44 men) found that narcissism was positively linked with mate appeal for both short-term and long-term relationships, in both sexes. The authors say that link was due to shared variance with extraversion in men and with physical attractiveness in women. In women, psychopathy was also linked with mate appeal for short-term relationships. It was a small sample at one event.

A 2010 study by Mitja Back and colleagues (73 first-year students, 2,628 pairs of judgments) found that narcissists were popular at first sight, and that the aspects of narcissism most harmful over time (exploitativeness and entitlement) were the ones most attractive at zero acquaintance. They linked part of this to observable behavior and appearance.

Then the time dimension. A 2015 study by Leckelt and colleagues put 311 participants in small groups that met weekly for three weeks. Over that time, narcissists became less popular. The positive effect of "admiration" traits (being dominant and expressive) shrank, while the negative effect of "rivalry" traits grew, tied to arrogant, aggressive behavior and being seen as untrustworthy. That study measured popularity in groups, not dating, so it supports a "first impressions versus time" pattern without proving it for relationships.

Finally, a 2023 survey of 3,895 people from 41 countries (Csajbók and colleagues) asked people to rate their own desirability as a short-term and long-term partner. Dark Triad traits were weakly linked with rating oneself as more desirable for short-term relationships (up to r = .13) and showed little or no link with long-term desirability. That's self-rating, mostly students, and it measures how people see themselves, not who actually gets chosen.

What this adds up to

The pull "fades" is a common way to describe it. What the studies support is narrower: traits that raise first-impression appeal are not the ones most strongly linked with relationship quality later. A large 2020 analysis of 43 datasets (11,196 couples) found that people's own judgments of the relationship, such as how committed their partner seemed and how appreciated they felt, were the strongest predictors of satisfaction, while personality traits added little. That's about satisfaction in existing couples, not about who people pick.

What to do next

  1. Separate confidence from carelessness. Confidence is speaking plainly and holding a view. Carelessness is being late, vague or dismissive. Practice the first and drop the second.
  2. Say one opinion in your next three conversations. Something small and real ("I'd pick the smaller bar"), with a smile, instead of agreeing with everything.
  3. Be consistent in week two as well as week one. If you text, show up on time and do what you said, because reliability is what many of the long-term findings point to.
  4. Don't copy a persona. A manufactured edge can raise curiosity at first, but if it isn't you, you'll have to keep it up. Negging is one example of a tactic that rests on this idea.
  5. Check your own list. Reread what people look for in a partner and note which traits you'd want in someone for a year, not a night.

In Run Game, a note on each logged approach (what you said, how it landed) shows over time whether your best conversations came from warmth, humor or confidence, which is better evidence than a theory. For more, see how attraction works, why nice guys struggle, being a good partner and red flags in someone you're dating.

If this is on your mind, status and value in dating goes further.

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