If you really want to look into how attraction works, check out psychological research on 'social rank theory' by Price & Sloman.
They don't link it particularly to seduction and attraction, they look at the other end of the spectrum, how social defeat leads to depression, submissive, supplicating behaviour.
I keep thinking about posting about this, or writing a document, it's fascinating, for instance....
In experiments where they placed a dominant male rat in the same pen as a lower value male, after the defeat by the dominant rat, the defeated rat showed symptoms of submissive behaviour, averted eye gaze, less environmental scanning (you know when you're beta and you walk in a room full of people and don't look anyone in the eye or around the room, you just scuttle to the nearest empty space/seat), as well as biological signs of anxiety and depression.
The dominants show higher social value. Human men hold beauty as a way of measuring a women's social rank, women gauge a man's social rank by this assertiveness and confidence much more than looks. The balance of these percieved social ranks is what we are playing with with all this PUA stuff.
We can use this stuff to show our dominance by going the other way with assertive, dominant behaviour.
