Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [11]
The power of expectations is so great that it has an almost preternatural ability to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In one study, after a test was given to all the students in an elementary school, a few students were randomly selected, and the teachers were told that these students had scored so highly on the test that they were sure to excel in the coming year. The parents and the students weren’t told about this so that the only difference was in the minds of the teachers. But just that small intervention led to a major difference. By the end of the year, the falsely anointed “exceptional” students showed significantly higher gains in their IQ scores than the other students. In other words, simply leading the teachers to believe that these students were special led those teachers to treat them in a way that ended up making them special.
Experiments have demonstrated the same power of expectations for attraction. In one study, men and women were asked to talk on the phone and get acquainted with an unknown member of the opposite sex. Before the conversation, each man was given a photograph of his supposed partner. The actual photograph was randomly selected from a group that was either attractive or unattractive. The women were not given photographs. Then, the couples spoke on the phone for roughly ten minutes about anything they wanted. Men who had received photos of beautiful women spoke to the women in a way that caused the women to be friendlier and more flirtatious—acting for all intents and purposes as beautiful women, regardless of their actual appearance.
In The Psychology of Human Conflict, Edwin Guthrie tells a remarkable story of how one college woman was transformed in real life by a similar experiment. A group of college men chose a shy, socially inept student and decided to treat her as if she were one of the most popular girls at the school. They made sure she was invited to the right parties and always had men asking her to dance and generally acted as if they were lucky to be in her company. Before the school year had ended, her behavior had completely changed. She was more confident and came to believe that she was indeed popular. Even after the men ended their experiment (although without telling her anything about it), she continued to behave with self-assurance. But here is the really amazing part—even the men who “conducted” the experiment came to see her in the same way, so fully had her demeanor been transformed. If only someone would secretly hire the people around us to treat us not as we are but as we wish to be, we might all become the people we aspire to be.
HOW FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE WINNING THE LOTTERY—BUT NOT IN THE WAY THAT YOU THINK
The point of all of this is not to befuddle you—befuddling though the working of the mind often is. Some people might read this chapter and be tempted to redouble their efforts to impose some sort of rationality on their dating, but I believe that is exactly the wrong response. If anything, all of this information should teach us to trust our intuition more and our conscious mind less. And we should also remember that the tricks our minds play on us are not necessarily a bad thing for our love lives. For example, being in a relationship appears to lessen how attractive we find other people. In one study, male students in a relationship judged unknown women 10 percent