Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [99]
For those looking for the material found in The Dating Mind, a good place to start would be Timothy D. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), which is a fascinating exploration of the various ways our minds play tricks on us. Ayala Malach Pines’s Falling in Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose (New York: Routledge, 1999) also offers many absorbing insights. And I would recommend dipping into the outstanding works in the field of happiness studies, particularly Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006) and Stefan Klein’s The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy—and What We Can Do to Get Happier (New York: Marlowe and Company, 2006). To find out how the fear of shock or a scary walk across a bridge can boost attraction, see D. G. Dutton and A. P. Aron, “Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30:4 (October, 1974): 510-517. For the power of (perceived) excessive masturbation to change one’s feelings about a relationship, see N. Schwartz and B. Scheuring, “Judgments of relationship satisfaction: Inter- and intra-individual comparison strategies as a function of questionnaire structure,” European Journal of Social Psychology 18:6 (December, 1988): 485-496. For the problems caused by thinking too much about which painting to choose, see T. D. Wilson, et al., “Introspecting about reasons can reduce post-choice satisfaction,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19:3 (June, 1993): 331-339. For the difficulties of too many jams, see T. D. Wilson and J. W. Schooler, “Thinking too much: Introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60:2 (February, 1991): 181-192. For the power of introspection to change our views about our romantic relationships, see T. D. Wilson and D. Kraft, “Why do I love thee?: Effects of repeated introspections about dating relationships on attitudes toward the relationship,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19:4 (August, 1993): 409-418. For the ability of teacher expectations to transform student achievement, see R. Rosenthal and L. Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher expectation and pupil’s intellectual development (Williston, VT: Crown House Publishing, 2003). For the probing study of colonoscopies and Kahneman’s peak-end rule, see D. A. Redelmeier and D. Kahneman, “Patients’ memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures” in Pain 66:1 (1996): 3-8. For the study on “North Dakotan” wine, see Brian Wansink, et al., “Fine as North Dakota wine: Sensory experiences and food intake,” in Physiology and Behavior 90:5 (2007): 712-716. For the power of an attractive woman’s picture to change the nature of a telephone conversation, see M. Snyder, et al., “Social perception and impersonal behavior: On the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes,” Journal of Social Psychiatry 35 (1977): 656-666. For one of the many studies on lottery winners and accident victims, see P. Brickman, D. Coates, and R. Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36:8 (August, 1978): 917-928.
For those interested in the Darwinian perspective, David Buss’s The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 2003) is a fascinating account of evolutionary psychology and relationships (in fact, all of his books make excellent reading). Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003) is an insightful look at the never-ending battle simply to stay in place, and Donald Symons’s The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), though sadly out of print, will astound the most jaded reader. For discussions of chimps, bonobos,