Decoding Love Read online

  If you want a startling indication of how easily romantic attraction can be spurred with the right priming, try exposing your date to extreme duress, or a little dating technique I like to call shock therapy for love. You see, we don’t do a very good job of distinguishing between sexual arousal and arousal related to other emotions, such as fear. So one way to prime an individual for romantic attraction is to scare the hell out of him or her. In one study, male students were brought into a room with a large amount of electrical equipment. The male students were told that the study involved the effect of electrical shocks on learning, but the real purpose was to study the effect of fear on arousal. There were two levels of shock, one that was very painful and another that was mild. An attractive woman was also supposedly taking the shock test, although she was actually part of the experiment. The level of the shock was determined by a coin flip. The experimenter then told the student that he needed to get more information about the student’s feelings before administering the shocks, because that could influence the experiment. The male student was sent away to answer a questionnaire, including questions about how much he would like to kiss the woman in the study and how much he would like to ask her out on a date. Being faced with a painful electrical jolt was like Cupid’s arrow. The students who were anticipating the painful shocks were significantly more attracted to the woman and had both a greater desire to kiss her and to ask her on a date. In fact, one can simply pretend to go through a painful experience and still elicit a similar reaction. In another study on attraction, male students pretended that a female interrogator was painfully torturing them by putting acid into their eyes (the interrogator actually used water). The students so thoroughly embraced their roles—they screamed and shook with fear—that they later reported they had experienced real fear. The result? They were far more attracted to the female interrogator than male students who only pretended that they were being interrogated in a mild way—a radical twist on the idea of sexual role playing. Perhaps the CIA can get itself off the hook for its new interrogation methods by claiming that they are really dating techniques.

  You don’t have to hook your date up to a car battery just to spur a little romance. All you need is something at least mildly scary. In a famous study, an attractive young woman waited for men to cross the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge in Vancouver. The bridge is only a few feet wide, more than four hundred feet long, and is constructed of wood boards and cables that tilt and sway in the wind. And if you fall off the bridge, you face a 230-foot drop into rocks and shallow water—just the kind of thing to get the heart racing. Once a man crossed the bridge, the woman in the study would walk up to him and tell him that she was doing a project on attractive scenery. She would then ask him some questions. At the end, she would write down her name and phone number and invite the man to call her if he wanted to talk more about the study. As a control group, a similar experiment was run at a much safer bridge nearby. Once the men had been primed for arousal by crossing the suspension bridge, how much more likely were they to call the woman? A lot more likely—eight times more likely, in fact. Once we are aroused, whether it is from fear or anger or desire, that arousal will change how we look at someone so that a person we might never have noticed becomes someone we feel a strong attraction to.

  Before you go out and start trying to prime some romantic prospect, though, be forewarned. All of these effects were the product of controlled environments in which the participants had no idea they were being primed. Consciously setting out to manipulate another person is more difficult and comes with a big risk—if the person becomes aware of the manipulation, not only does it fail to work, but it tends to backfire. And you can’t make someone who isn’t attracted to you become attracted just by scaring him or her. Priming will only intensify the feelings that are already present so that if someone finds you unattractive, this type of priming will only make him or her find you even more unattractive.

  All of this may seem far-fetched, but my interviews have turned up countless stories about more idiosyncratic flashpoints that have sparked romantic desire. Call them our personal primers. Something as prosaic as gardening will do. One woman traveled from England for a conference and found herself seated next to a man at breakfast. She never said a word to him. She said that she simply hadn’t had her coffee, although he claimed that she seemed to dislike him and scowled at him the entire time. Later, they ended up at a bar with some other people from the conference, where she remained utterly uninterested in his charms—until they started talking about gardening. It was, she said, “as if the lightning bolt struck.” Why gardening? It conjured up some of her favorite memories as a child playing in the garden with her sister. Even though she lived in a different country than the man and left the day after meeting him, the two married ten months later. Others recounted similar experiences involving different priming—drinking bourbon, discovering that the person went to the same high school, even a certain perfume (which the man later realized was the same one that his mother wore, leading to a most uncomfortable Oedipal moment). The likelihood is that we all have these personal trigger points, even though we are usually unaware of them. We are all also primed by the romantic story line itself, which teaches us to expect love to occur in a certain manner, although that manner may be a largely false and misleading construction. For instance, we tend to believe that a couple should immediately fall head over heels in love, even though those people are precisely the ones who tend to end up in divorce court (more on that later, in the chapter on marriage).

  THE DANGERS OF SELF-PLEASURE

  It’s not just priming that throws people off. How you frame an issue also has a significant effect. Let’s take a relatively simple consumer study of grocery shoppers to illustrate this. Before shopping, one group was asked what was in their wallet—not the amount of cash but simply what else they carried, such as credit cards or coupons. The second group was asked about what they had in their financial portfolios. Neither question has much to do with how most of us typically shop. We don’t check our portfolios (if we are lucky enough to have them) before deciding on our grocery list, nor do we worry about whether or not we are carrying a library card. But the researchers found that simply forcing shoppers to focus briefly on their wallets or their portfolios—“framing” their grocery purchases in these different contexts—radically affected their spending. Those thinking about their wallets spent $6.88 on average, but those thinking about their portfolios wound up spending $9.09, an increase of more than 32 percent. Framing is similar to priming, but while priming uses specific cues to influence someone’s behavior, framing alters behavior by shifting the context.

  As with priming, it turns out that framing relationships can have a profound effect on how the people in those relationships feel about each other. In fact, you can insidiously undermine a relationship just by planting certain ideas about what is normal. That’s exactly what Norbert Schwartz did in a study of male college students. Schwartz selected students who were already in a relationship with a steady partner, and he asked them a number of questions about their sex lives. One of the questions was how often the men masturbated, but Schwartz added a sly wrinkle. He used two different scales when he asked the question. One group was given a scale that ranged from more than once a day to less than once a week (the high-frequency scale). The other group was given a scale ranging from more than once a week to never (the low-frequency group, or, in Seinfeldian terms, the masters of their domain). Needless to say, the rigged scales influenced the amount of masturbation the men reported—those on the high-frequency scale reported slightly more than nine episodes a month, while those in the low-frequency group reported slightly more than seven episodes a month—but even with that shift, both groups still fell within the typical range, according to numerous studies of sexual behavior.

  The really interesting aspect of the study was how it influenced the men’s perception of their relationship. Depending on the scale used, the answers ap
peared at very different points in the spectrum, even though the actual amount of masturbation was similar. For the high-frequency scale, once or twice a week put them in the middle, which made their answers seem entirely normal and unexceptionable. For the low-frequency scale, though, once or twice a week put them at the high end of the scale, which fostered the impression that they were engaging in an excessive amount of self-flagellation. Planting that one small seed of worry—framing the question so that the students thought that they were masturbating too much—didn’t just affect the students’ opinions of their sex lives. It affected their entire relationship. In follow-up questionnaires, Schwartz found that these students were plagued with doubts and expressed more dissatisfaction with their relationships. He got a similar result when he manipulated the scales for a question on the frequency of sex between the men and their partners.

  All sorts of things in our lives can frame our experiences. For instance, how we experience something has a great deal to do with what sort of experiences we have had in the past. The same experience might seem great if our previous experiences have been awful, or it might seem disappointing if our previous experiences have been fantastic. And it is hard to imagine that this doesn’t happen every time you meet a romantic prospect. If your previous partners tended to be wonderful, you will almost definitely undervalue your current one. Or if your experiences have been horrendous, you will probably have an overly positive view of the next person, even if that person is only slightly less horrendous. One woman admitted to a congenital case of this. After enjoying an idyllic college romance, she says her dating life has been a disaster, largely because no one ever seemed to measure up to her rosy memories of her college boyfriend.

  If you could manipulate your date’s point of comparison, you could make all of this work in your favor—at least according to a recent article in The Journal of Consumer Research. In that study, students watched excerpts from the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and then rated the movie. Afterward, they were allowed to pick one of four free DVDs, one of which was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But there was a twist. One group of students was offered a bunch of crappy movies (Lighthouses of Scotland, anyone?), which made it almost certain that they would choose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The other group was given a much more appealing selection, which meant that they were far less likely to pick Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then, both groups were asked to remember the rating they had originally given the movie. Students who were offered the bad movies remembered liking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 10.1 percent more than they had originally, while students offered the good movies remembered liking it 7 percent less. So, all you need to do is make sure that your date’s recent points of comparison are roughly on a par with Lighthouses of Scotland, and you will be all set.

  HOW THINKING TOO MUCH IS BAD FOR YOUR DATING

  Before you go off, confident that you will avoid falling into the traps of priming or framing by bringing ruthless rationality to all of your decisions, I have to warn you against turning to an overly cerebral approach to dating: consciously thinking about your decision making is perhaps even more dangerous than not thinking at all. There are probably some among us—I admit to being one—who, when faced with a tough decision, decide to sit down and write out a list of all the pros and cons so that we can make an informed choice. Well, I’m here to tell you that this is a disastrously bad idea and likely to lead to worse decisions, especially if the subject we are examining is difficult to articulate. Or, as I like to think of this section, the unexamined life is worth living!

  Imagine that you are given a choice of five different posters to decorate your room. One of them is a van Gogh, another is a Monet. The other three are captioned cartoons or photos of animals. Which do you choose? Researchers ran precisely this study with college students, and, as you might expect, most people preferred the posters by van Gogh and Monet. No great surprise there. We probably didn’t need a study to find that the average college student prefers van Gogh to a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. But that was not the purpose of the study. Researchers were interested in how thinking about that decision might alter it, so they asked half of the people involved to write a short essay explaining what they liked or disliked about the five posters. Afterward, all of the students were allowed to choose one of the posters and then take it home.

  A surprising thing happened when students were asked to write the brief essay: after doing that, they preferred the funny posters. When researchers called the students a few weeks later, those same students were less satisfied with their choice than the students who hadn’t written essays. So what was it about writing a brief essay that both altered the students’ choices and also made them more dissatisfied with those choices? According to the researchers, what we can find words for is not necessarily what is most important. In this case, describing what we find alluring about van Gogh is a lot harder than explaining why we find one poster funnier than another. We think we are coming up with legitimate reasons why we prefer the funny poster, but what we are doing is coming up with reasons we can articulate. The mind, though, works its black magic on our decision so that we believe we are coming up with our deep, heartfelt convictions. That’s why the students who wrote about their preferences ended up taking the funny posters home with them. But those written reasons didn’t capture their deeper feelings. Once time had passed, and the students had forgotten about their written responses, their unarticulated preferences had a chance to reemerge, explaining why those students were also the ones who felt more dissatisfied.

  Maybe you think that posters are too abstract—a representation, rather than the real thing. Well, it turns out that even something as concrete as our taste buds can be flummoxed when we are forced to write about why we like the way something tastes. Two scientists gathered a group of college students and had them sit down and sample five different brands of strawberry jam. Now, one thing that most people will confidently claim is that they know their own taste preferences, so you would think that selecting a favorite jam would be a simple matter. But the study threw in a twist. One group of students was simply asked to choose which jam they liked best. Another group was asked to analyze the reasons behind their choice. When the two groups had their preferences compared to the judgments of expert taste testers, the group who simply tasted and chose came the closest to matching the preferences of the pros.

  The question is, why? Shouldn’t thinking carefully about a judgment lead to more accurate judgments? Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. Our minds can do worse when forced to “think rationally.” In the case of the group asked to provide reasons, the students came up with reasons all right—only those reasons shaped the eventual choices that they made. In other words, they did not think about things in the order that we would suspect. You would imagine that they would taste the jams, pick a favorite, and then try to figure out why it was their favorite. But most of us aren’t expert food tasters and aren’t trained to think in terms of the qualities of similar foods. So, instead of tasting, choosing, and then analyzing, the students found reasons that they could articulate and only then chose jams that would fit with their reasons. And this isn’t simply a jam problem—it applies to a variety of foodstuffs. The results were replicated by another study involving chocolate-chip cookies. Actually, it applies to a whole range of things. Whenever people are asked to describe something verbally that is typically not put into words, the process of putting it into words appears to screw up their thinking. When people are forced to describe a color, they later have more difficulty remembering it. When they are forced to describe a face they have been shown, they are less able to recognize that face on subsequent tests.

  Of course, we would like to believe that the poster study or the jam study has nothing to teach us about our love lives. While it may be difficult to express exactly what it is that touches us when we look at a great work of art, surely it is a far simpler matter to figure out what it is that we like or disli
ke about someone. Comforting though such a notion might be, it is wrong. You only need to look at a similar study involving college couples who had recently started dating. Once a week for four weeks, half of the participants had to sit there for an hour and think about their relationship with their partner. The other half thought about an unrelated topic. At the end of each session, both groups had to answer a number of questions about their relationship. As you might expect after learning about the poster study, thinking about the relationship changed how people felt about it. After the first session, the group that had to think about their relationship changed their attitude. Some became more positive, and some became more negative. It would be tempting to point to this and say that, in contrast to the poster study, this reflection helped sharpen people’s sense of the relationship. But this was not the case. What the researchers found was that people came up with thoughts about their relationship that had nothing to do with their initial feelings (which were measured before the study began). Did they question those thoughts? No! They changed their feelings to fit with the reasons they had come up with. Although it took them longer, the other half of the participants also had their attitudes changed just as much, simply by answering questions about their relationship. It would be nice to think that these changes occurred because the couples had recently started dating and would understandably be susceptible to changes of heart, but other studies have revealed that this explanation is highly unlikely. Even when married couples and couples who have dated one another for longer periods of time were used, the results were the same.