Decoding Love (3 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
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 experiences have been fantastic. And it is hard to imagine that this doesn’t happen every time you meet a romantic prospect. If your previous partners tended to be wonderful, you will almost definitely undervalue your current one. Or if your experiences have been horrendous, you will probably have an overly positive view of the next person, even if that person is only slightly less horrendous. One woman admitted to a congenital case of this. After enjoying an idyllic college romance, she says her dating life has been a disaster, largely because no one ever seemed to measure up to her rosy memories of her college boyfriend.
If you could manipulate your date’s point of comparison, you could make all of this work in your favor—at least according to a recent article in
The Journal of Consumer Research.
In that study, students watched excerpts from the movie
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
and then rated the movie. Afterward, they were allowed to pick one of four free DVDs, one of which was
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
But there was a twist. One group of students was offered a bunch of crappy movies (
Lighthouses of Scotland,
anyone?), which made it almost certain that they would choose
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The other group was given a much more appealing selection, which meant that they were far less likely to pick
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Then, both groups were asked to remember the rating they had originally given the movie. Students who were offered the bad movies remembered liking
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
10.1 percent more than they had originally, while students offered the good movies remembered liking it 7 percent less. So, all you need to do is make sure that your date’s recent points of comparison are roughly on a par with
Lighthouses of Scotland
, and you will be all set.
The Journal of Consumer Research.
In that study, students watched excerpts from the movie
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
and then rated the movie. Afterward, they were allowed to pick one of four free DVDs, one of which was
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
But there was a twist. One group of students was offered a bunch of crappy movies (
Lighthouses of Scotland,
anyone?), which made it almost certain that they would choose
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The other group was given a much more appealing selection, which meant that they were far less likely to pick
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Then, both groups were asked to remember the rating they had originally given the movie. Students who were offered the bad movies remembered liking
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
10.1 percent more than they had originally, while students offered the good movies remembered liking it 7 percent less. So, all you need to do is make sure that your date’s recent points of comparison are roughly on a par with
Lighthouses of Scotland
, and you will be all set.
Before you go off, confident that you will avoid falling into the traps of priming or framing by bringing ruthless rationality to all of your decisions, I have to warn you against turning to an overly cerebral approach to dating: consciously thinking about your decision making is perhaps even more dangerous than not thinking at all. There are probably some among us—I admit to being one—who, when faced with a tough decision, decide to sit down and write out a list of all the pros and cons so that we can make an informed choice. Well, I’m here to tell you that this is a disastrously bad idea and likely to lead to worse decisions, especially if the subject we are examining is difficult to articulate. Or, as I like to think of this section, the unexamined life
is
worth living!
is
worth living!
Imagine that you are given a choice of five different posters to decorate your room. One of them is a van Gogh, another is a Monet. The other three are captioned cartoons or photos of animals. Which do you choose? Researchers ran precisely this study with college students, and, as you might expect, most people preferred the posters by van Gogh and Monet. No great surprise there. We probably didn’t need a study to find that the average college student prefers van Gogh to a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. But that was not the purpose of the study. Researchers were interested in how thinking about that decision might alter it, so they asked half of the people involved to write a short essay explaining what they liked or disliked about the five posters. Afterward, all of the students were allowed to choose one of the posters and then take it home.
A surprising thing happened when students were asked to write the brief essay: after doing that, they preferred the funny posters. When researchers called the students a few weeks later, those same students were less satisfied with their choice than the students who hadn’t written essays. So what was it about writing a brief essay that both altered the students’ choices and also made them more dissatisfied with those choices? According to the researchers, what we can find words for is not necessarily what is most important. In this case, describing what we find alluring about van Gogh is a lot harder than explaining why we find one poster funnier than another. We think we are coming up with legitimate reasons why we prefer the funny poster, but what we are doing is coming up with reasons we can articulate. The mind, though, works its black magic on our decision so that we believe we are coming up with our deep, heartfelt convictions. That’s why the students who wrote about their preferences ended up taking the funny posters home with them. But those written reasons didn’t capture their deeper feelings. Once time had passed, and the students had forgotten about their written responses, their unarticulated preferences had a chance to reemerge, explaining why those students were also the ones who felt more dissatisfied.
Maybe you think that posters are too abstract—a representation, rather than the real thing. Well, it turns out that even something as concrete as our taste buds can be flummoxed when we are forced to write about why we like the way something tastes. Two scientists gathered a group of college students and had them sit down and sample five different brands of strawberry jam. Now, one thing that most people will confidently claim is that they know their own taste preferences, so you would think that selecting a favorite jam would be a simple matter. But the study threw in a twist. One group of students was simply asked to choose which jam they liked best. Another group was asked to analyze the reasons behind their choice. When the two groups had their preferences compared to the judgments of expert taste testers, the group who simply tasted and chose came the closest to matching the preferences of the pros.
The question is, why? Shouldn’t thinking carefully about a judgment lead to more accurate judgments? Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. Our minds can do worse when forced to “think rationally.” In the case of the group asked to provide reasons, the students came up with reasons all right—only those reasons shaped the eventual choices that they made. In other words, they did not think about things in the order that we would suspect. You would imagine that they would taste the jams, pick a favorite, and then try to figure out why it was their favorite. But most of us aren’t expert food tasters and aren’t trained to think in terms of the qualities of similar foods. So, instead of tasting, choosing, and then analyzing, the students found reasons that they could articulate
and only then
chose jams that would fit with their reasons. And this isn’t simply a jam problem—it applies to a variety of foodstuffs. The results were replicated by another study involving chocolate-chip cookies. Actually, it applies to a whole range of things. Whenever people are asked to describe something verbally that is typically not put into words, the process of putting it into words appears to screw up their thinking. When people are forced to describe a color, they later have more difficulty remembering it. When they are forced to describe a face they have been shown, they are less able to recognize that face on subsequent tests.
and only then
chose jams that would fit with their reasons. And this isn’t simply a jam problem—it applies to a variety of foodstuffs. The results were replicated by another study involving chocolate-chip cookies. Actually, it applies to a whole range of things. Whenever people are asked to describe something verbally that is typically not put into words, the process of putting it into words appears to screw up their thinking. When people are forced to describe a color, they later have more difficulty remembering it. When they are forced to describe a face they have been shown, they are less able to recognize that face on subsequent tests.
Of course, we would like to believe that the poster study or the jam study has nothing to teach us about our love lives. While it may be difficult to express exactly what it is that touches us when we look at a great work of art, surely it is a far simpler matter to figure out what it is that we like or dislike about someone. Comforting though such a notion might be, it is wrong. You only need to look at a similar study involving college couples who had recently started dating. Once a week for four weeks, half of the participants had to sit there for an hour and think about their relationship with their partner. The other half thought about an unrelated topic. At the end of each session, both groups had to answer a number of questions about their relationship. As you might expect after learning about the poster study, thinking about the relationship changed how people felt about it. After the first session, the group that had to think about their relationship changed their attitude. Some became more positive, and some became more negative. It would be tempting to point to this and say that, in contrast to the poster study, this reflection helped sharpen people’s sense of the relationship. But this was not the case. What the researchers found was that people came up with thoughts about their relationship that had nothing to do with their initial feelings (which were measured before the study began). Did they question those thoughts? No! They changed their feelings to fit with the reasons they had come up with. Although it took them longer, the other half of the participants also had their attitudes changed just as much, simply by answering questions about their relationship. It would be nice to think that these changes occurred because the couples had recently started dating and would understandably be susceptible to changes of heart, but other studies have revealed that this explanation is highly unlikely. Even when married couples and couples who have dated one another for longer periods of time were used, the results were the same.
Another study found that the attitudes of students who had
not
analyzed their relationship with their partners were actually a far better predictor of whether the couple would still be dating several months later than the attitudes of students who had analyzed their relationship. Once again, the study found a disconnect between the things people could articulate and the things they actually felt. As numerous studies have found, when we are forced to analyze our preferences for everything from why we like someone to what food we prefer, the reasons we come up with only rarely have anything to do with the actual reasons. As Alexander Pope warned, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—a warning that is particularly relevant when it comes to thinking about relationships, which are by their very nature complex and difficult to pin down.
not
analyzed their relationship with their partners were actually a far better predictor of whether the couple would still be dating several months later than the attitudes of students who had analyzed their relationship. Once again, the study found a disconnect between the things people could articulate and the things they actually felt. As numerous studies have found, when we are forced to analyze our preferences for everything from why we like someone to what food we prefer, the reasons we come up with only rarely have anything to do with the actual reasons. As Alexander Pope warned, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—a warning that is particularly relevant when it comes to thinking about relationships, which are by their very nature complex and difficult to pin down.
What all this should teach us is a certain humility about our own explanations, particularly if we do not have expertise in a particular area. While an art historian can easily provide an array of sophisticated reasons for the superiority of van Gogh to Dilbert, we non-art historians would be better off simply trusting our intuition. The same holds true for dating. Despite what we may think, the vast majority of us should not consider ourselves experts when it comes to relationships, no matter how great a blow that is to our own egos. We can go wrong in all sorts of ways. If someone fits the profile we think we are supposed to love, we may ignore how we actually feel. If our feelings conflict with some larger belief that we have (I could never love a smoker) or that the culture fosters (love should feel like X), we are likely to ignore our feelings and cling to the belief.
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