Temporary Bluffing Can Be Rewarding in Social Systems: The Case of Romantic Relationships

Abstract

We show in this article that temporary bluffing has the power of promoting the transition from a bad to a good state in social systems. The analysis is carried out with reference to the simplest unit of interest in sociology—the couple—but it can be certainly extended to larger social groups. More precisely, an already available mathematical model shows that couples composed of so-called secure individuals with neither too high nor too low appeals have two alternative romantic regimes—one satisfactory and one not. Thus, if one of these couples is trapped in its unsatisfactory regime the problem is how to escape from that trap and switch to the satisfactory regime. Temporary bluffing, namely, giving to the partner for a sufficiently long time a biased impression of the involvement or of the appeal, is a very effective, though not unique, way for performing the switch. This, in a sense, attenuates the negative moral value usually given to bluffing in social behavior.

Keywords:

• differential equations
• mathematical modeling
• social groups

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms.