Decoding Love Read Online Free
Author: Andrew Trees
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
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
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