Decoding Love (20 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
Since then, the same game has been run in a number of research labs with the same results. In one test, more than forty groups were studied, and in each and every case the group went over the one-dollar mark. Half the time the bidding only stopped when one of the players had offered all his money and couldn’t bid anymore. Researchers also found that people rarely learned from their mistakes and that even players who had already engaged in the game would usually still end up bidding more than a dollar. What makes this especially striking is that the item being bid for—one dollar—has a precise value. There can be no confusion about what it is worth. Even the slowest of players realizes that bidding more than a dollar to win a dollar makes no sense. When researchers tried to understand why people continued to bid, they found that it wasn’t an economic calculation but an emotional one. Sure, when players started the game, they said that they were bidding primarily to win money. As the bidding moved higher, though, they changed their answers and claimed that they were doing it to prove a point, making such obviously self-defeating remarks as, “I won’t be made a fool of.” Although all of us are probably snickering at the fool who paid twenty dollars, the evidence suggests that we would be equally foolish.
Shubik’s game is not simply a parlor trick but offers an excellent way to look at the problem of escalation. You can find examples of it throughout the real world. For example, Lyndon Johnson’s rhetoric about the Vietnam War changed dramatically between 1964 and 1968. At first, Johnson emphasized democracy, freedom, and justice. Later, though, he spoke about national honor and avoiding the appearance of weakness, which as game theorist Laszlo Mero noted in his excellent discussion of the dollar auction from which this is drawn, “is strangely similar to the changes in motivation expressed in the dollar auction game.”
This conundrum is even useful in understanding our everyday lives. If you have ever been in a hurry to get somewhere and were waiting for a bus, you have probably experienced a dollar auction situation. You may be debating whether or not to take a cab, and in fact if you walk to the bus stop and don’t see a bus, you may just hop in a cab. The longer you wait, though, the more likely you are to continue waiting because you feel as if you have already invested all that time in waiting for the bus. Although we don’t realize it, we engage in self-defeating dollar auctions all the time. Mero writes, “The principle of the dollar auction keeps many people in unsatisfying jobs and unhappy marriages.”
What does all this have to do with dating? Quite a lot, actually. Take the animal kingdom. There are regularly situations when two males come into conflict over a female or a good mating territory. Some species fight, but others choose not to for a variety of reasons. For example, they may have particularly dangerous weapons, and a fight would possibly be fatal. In these cases, the animals often resort to something called “posing.” Basically, they stand there and eyeball each other to see who wants it more and is willing to wait longer. In other words, a classic dollar auction situation. How do they solve this? As we’ve already seen, humans are not very good at escaping dollar auctions. We tend to empty out our pockets and throw everything we can at winning the auction. According to the mathematicians, the animals should assign a value for whatever it is they are fighting over and then choose to pose for a random amount of time based on that number. For example, if one of the males decides that the female is worth twenty minutes of his time, he should pose for some random variation between, say, twelve minutes and twenty-eight minutes. If he wins, great. If not, he simply walks away when he reaches his limit. When actual animals in the wild were studied, it turned out that they followed precisely this logic. In other words, most animals act much more rationally in this sort of situation than one particular kind of animal, human beings.
If we keep this in mind, it might help end a lot of suffering and misery for ourselves as daters, although it will mean that we have to give up some cherished romantic notions, which tend to land people in dollar-auction situations. For example, take the idea of unrequited love. The romantic story line tells us that a lover’s constancy and persistence will ultimately be rewarded when the beloved finally recognizes his or her worth, but that is exactly the kind of thinking that can lead to a dollar auction. The more time that passes, the more the lover insists that there must be some sort of reward for all of his or her effort. And being in a relationship is also no protection against fruitless dollar auctions. Once you have been with someone long enough, you may avoid breaking off a relationship, even if you find it unsatisfying, because of all the time you’ve already invested. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that anyone who has much dating experience has unwittingly found himself or herself in a dollar auction at some point. If I could leave you with only one piece of advice from this chapter, it would be to avoid dollar auctions when dating. If you can’t avoid them, at least determine the price you are willing to pay beforehand so you know when to get out. Easier said than done, but no one ever promised that love was easy.
5
The Dating Dance
What I Learned About Dating from Hanging Out in Bars
W
E’VE FINALLY REACHED THE POINT WHERE THE RUBBER meets the road, that electric moment when someone catches your eye across a crowded room, and you know that you are going to spend the rest of your life together. At least, that’s what the romantic story line tells us. In truth, much as you would expect given the earlier chapters, you can do a remarkable number of things to enhance or detract from your appeal during your initial encounter with your Romeo or Juliet.
E’VE FINALLY REACHED THE POINT WHERE THE RUBBER meets the road, that electric moment when someone catches your eye across a crowded room, and you know that you are going to spend the rest of your life together. At least, that’s what the romantic story line tells us. In truth, much as you would expect given the earlier chapters, you can do a remarkable number of things to enhance or detract from your appeal during your initial encounter with your Romeo or Juliet.
Part of this chapter falls under a category that could be labeled “tricks” because it includes various methods to manipulate someone’s perception of you. I offer these “tricks” with a certain amount of hesitation. It’s not that I don’t think they will work—it’s that I think they might work too well. My intention throughout
Decoding Love
is to try to understand the secret springs of romantic attraction, not to provide a grab bag of techniques for getting what we want at other people’s expense. Just because the Machiavellian theory of the mind suggests that we have a tendency to deceive, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t struggle to rise above our baser instincts and embrace what James Madison called the better angels of our nature.
Decoding Love
is to try to understand the secret springs of romantic attraction, not to provide a grab bag of techniques for getting what we want at other people’s expense. Just because the Machiavellian theory of the mind suggests that we have a tendency to deceive, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t struggle to rise above our baser instincts and embrace what James Madison called the better angels of our nature.
With that said, let’s return to the crowded room and look at what happens on some enchanted evening. The first important point to realize is that only a small part of what you are communicating at any moment is coming from the actual words you are saying. There are three ways that we are constantly sending out messages to those around us: body language, tone of voice, and actual words. Of course, if you are explaining a dense mathematical problem, the vast bulk of your communication will be carried by your words, but most of our communication is not like that, especially when it comes to dating. In most casual conversations, what we say is the least important of the three aspects of communication. I have read varying estimates, but roughly speaking, the vast majority of our communication comes from body language and tone, while less than 10 percent of our communication is the words we speak. So, what you say is far less important than how you say it. In one study, college students were hooked up to a portable tape machine that recorded random samples of their conversations throughout the day. When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that even those small snippets were “saturated with unintentional messages.” We may not realize it, but in virtually all of our encounters, a vast sea of unspoken messages are passing back and forth, usually below our conscious notice.
All of this is doubly true for the world of dating where almost everything is done through oblique signals, rather than direct conversation. If you don’t believe me, let’s imagine a few scenarios. What would happen if a guy went up to a woman and told her that he found her incredibly attractive and wanted to sleep with her? If he was Brad Pitt, that might work. For most of us, though, that sort of direct approach would be a disaster. Or think how men would respond to a woman whose first question was how much money they made? Part of the reason for this is that these approaches don’t pay the necessary lip service to the romantic story line, which drills into us the idea that there should be some deep, innate attraction that can’t be explained by superficial external factors like a salary. This controlling myth is why dating is all about sending and receiving indirect verbal and nonverbal messages. For example, if you are a man and want to show off your financial success, don’t brag about the size of your bank account. Show it off through your mastery of the wine list or some other realm that more subtly advertises your success. Indirect signaling is so important that the single easiest way to improve your romantic life is to become better at reading the signals that other people are sending out and better at controlling your own signals. This chapter will, I hope, help you figure out how to do that.
If you don’t believe me, you simply need to look at a recent study of lap dancers by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and his assistant to see how our actions are drenched with messages of which we are completely unaware. It is safe to assume that a lap dancer is always going to try to appear as sexy and attractive as possible because doing so has a major effect on the tips she will receive. What Miller’s study found was that the amount of tips women received varied widely. And the variation wasn’t random. It was tied directly to the fertility cycle of the women. A menstruating lap dancer made on average thirty-five dollars an hour, and a woman who was neither ovulating nor menstruating averaged fifty dollars. During their fertile periods, though, lap dancers were like Bathsheba on ecstasy, averaging a whopping seventy dollars an hour, double the menstruating women. The researchers have speculated that men were responding to a variety of subtle cues, such as body odor and waist-to-hip ratio, but regardless of the cause, it is stunning evidence of the power of the unintentional signal.
Most of the women reading this book are not lap dancers, but researchers have found that fertility has a number of similar effects on women in general. For example, men looked at pictures of the same women when they were ovulating and when they were not ovulating and rated them as more attractive during their ovulation. As with Miller’s study, researchers are not entirely sure why this is the case. They think that men are responding to subtle cues related to things like lip color, pupil dilation, and skin tone. A woman’s fertility cycle also appears to alter
her
behavior. For example, researchers have found that women dress more provocatively and wear more jewelry during ovulation. Another study revealed that ovulating women send out more signals to attract men than their nonovulating counterparts. Ovulation even appears to influence a woman’s voice. In a recent study, men and women listened to recordings of women’s voices at different periods in their fertility cycles, and researchers found that women at their peak fertility were judged to have the most attractive voices. So, it turns out that women who want to get pregnant are not the only ones who should keep track of their ovulation cycle. Any woman who wants to meet a man should do the same and, at the very least, try to schedule dates during her days of peak fertility. One other piece of advice if you are a lap dancer or just trying to meet someone: being on the pill comes with a cost. According to the study, lap dancers on the pill averaged only thirty-seven dollars an hour (hardly different from menstruating women), while women not on the pill averaged fifty-three dollars. With a difference that stark, you can be sure that the pill has a similar effect on the appeal of women in general.
her
behavior. For example, researchers have found that women dress more provocatively and wear more jewelry during ovulation. Another study revealed that ovulating women send out more signals to attract men than their nonovulating counterparts. Ovulation even appears to influence a woman’s voice. In a recent study, men and women listened to recordings of women’s voices at different periods in their fertility cycles, and researchers found that women at their peak fertility were judged to have the most attractive voices. So, it turns out that women who want to get pregnant are not the only ones who should keep track of their ovulation cycle. Any woman who wants to meet a man should do the same and, at the very least, try to schedule dates during her days of peak fertility. One other piece of advice if you are a lap dancer or just trying to meet someone: being on the pill comes with a cost. According to the study, lap dancers on the pill averaged only thirty-seven dollars an hour (hardly different from menstruating women), while women not on the pill averaged fifty-three dollars. With a difference that stark, you can be sure that the pill has a similar effect on the appeal of women in general.
Even if most of us aren’t lap dancers, virtually all of us have spent some time in the belly of the beast: the bar scene, which has been the site of far more research than you might imagine. That’s right. Even the humble bar is a site of scientific interest—seedbed of bad pickup lines, drunken one-night stands, and even the occasional long-term romance. But not as far removed from the earlier chapters in this book as you might imagine. Think all the way back to the section on the precious egg and the profligate sperm. The same logic still applies, which means, for all of you astute evolutionary psychologists out there, that women are far more in control in this arena than it might appear. So, you can jettison all those cultural stereotypes about men being the aggressors and women being their passive playthings. Because, according to the research, it’s ladies first or, as biologists have dubbed it, female proceptivity.
However, women can’t simply walk up to a man, slap him on the back, and offer to buy him a drink. Studies show that women who are seen as taking the initiative with men are perceived negatively. This seems to be a paradox. Remember, though, the mating dance is not a simple, straightforward matter of ask and answer. It’s all about subtle (usually nonverbal) signals and cues.
Let’s start with a fairly simple demonstration of this principle at work. Many women have at one time or another found themselves attracted to a man but uncertain about how to get him to approach her. The answer is quite simple: eye contact, especially combined with a smile. Okay, you say, but how much eye contact? Again, the answer is simple: a lot—probably far more than most women are comfortable with! In a 1985 study, researchers set up a simple test. They had an attractive woman target a man roughly ten feet away and then see what it took to get him to approach her within ten minutes. They tried several variations: eye contact once or several times and either alone or paired with a smile. For women who have been raised under the myth that men are supposed to make the first move, I have some shocking news: men don’t just need encouragement. They need
a lot
of encouragement. Multiple times and in multiple ways. Even making eye contact multiple times if that signal wasn’t accompanied by a smile had a modest success rate of less than 20 percent. To be highly successful, a woman needed to make eye contact multiple times and accompany that eye contact with a smile. When she did, 60 percent of the men eventually approached her and struck up a conversation.
a lot
of encouragement. Multiple times and in multiple ways. Even making eye contact multiple times if that signal wasn’t accompanied by a smile had a modest success rate of less than 20 percent. To be highly successful, a woman needed to make eye contact multiple times and accompany that eye contact with a smile. When she did, 60 percent of the men eventually approached her and struck up a conversation.
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