Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [6]
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 appeared 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