Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [4]
What does all of this have to do with your love life? It turns out that attraction itself is remarkably susceptible to priming. In a recent study, students were handed either a hot or a cold cup of liquid. Any guesses as to how it influenced the students’ perception of the person handing them the coffee? If you guessed that the students judged the person to be cooler or warmer depending on the heat of the beverage, you are beginning to understand the susceptibility of all of us to priming. If you want a real world example, studies also show that putting someone in a nice setting, such as a fancy restaurant, increased how attractive other people found that person.
I thought this sounded a little crazy until I interviewed one woman who had experienced exactly that sort of priming. She went on a date to a nice restaurant, had a wonderful time, and spent all week looking forward to her next date, which ended up being a bit of a letdown. But she chalked it up to an off night and went out with him again, only to be disappointed a second time. After a few more lackluster dates, she broke it off and didn’t see him again. The funny thing is, she never thought that the restaurant itself might have “primed” her until I started discussing my research with her. As I told her about how the setting in which you place someone can alter how that person is viewed, she suddenly interrupted me to say that she had just realized that her change of heart was not caused by the man but by the restaurants. The first one had been so lovely that it had cast a romantic glow over the entire date, including the man in question. Without that setting, though, her feelings for him proved to be tepid at best. In other words, her inconstancy was due not to the fickle nature of attraction but to the fickle nature of priming.
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