THE GIST He loves me, maybe? Women are most attracted to men when they’re unsure just how much the men like them.

Not...’: Uncertainty Can Increase Romantic Attraction” by Erin R. Whitchurch, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert.

FOR those single women suffering angst over “Will he call or won’t he?” it seems counterintuitive to think that such uncertainty could possibly hold any appeal. And to think that not knowing actually makes women like men more: Are we really such masochists?

Pretty much, says a new study by Erin R. Whitchurch and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard. According to their paper, published in Psychological Science and based on an experiment conducted with undergraduates, women find men who may like them more appealing than men who definitely do.

A group of female students at the University of Virginia were told they were evaluating whether Facebook could work as an online dating site; 47 women learned that male students from the University of Michigan and U.C.L.A. had viewed their profiles as well as those of 15 to 20 others. The women were then shown Facebook profiles of four “likeable, attractive” men. (The profiles were fake.)

One group of women was told that these four men were those who liked them the most, a second group heard that these men rated them as average and a third group was left in the unsettling position of thinking that the men might like them either the most or an average amount.

Not surprisingly, women were more attracted to men who found them attractive than men who rated them average. This is called the “reciprocity principle,” which holds that a woman should like a man less if he doesn’t like her much, and reflects earlier research. The shocker was that the women who found the men most attractive of all were those who weren’t sure just how much the men liked them.

The authors believe psychologists have underestimated the effects of a woman’s obsessing: When a prospective beau’s feelings are unknown, a woman thinks about him incessantly, mulling over whether he will ask her for coffee or ask out her best friend instead.

“If you’re thinking a lot about someone, you assume you like him,” said the lead author, Dr. Whitchurch, who wrote the study as part of her dissertation. “It’s really about the process of the way our minds work.”

There is a catch: Women in the study were uncertain about whether a man liked them a lot or an average amount — without the possibility that he found her utterly repulsive or ridiculous. In cases where the uncertainty includes a possible negative outcome, women are not pleased by ambiguity.

Furthermore, the behavior of a bunch of college students in a controlled experiment may not hold true to life. Still, there could be something to playing hard to get. Perhaps “The Rules” should apply to men, too.