59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (15 page)

Other work provides scientific justification for perhaps the most popular act of all—lying down on the job. An experiment conducted by Darren Lipnicki and Don Byrne at Australian National University involved asking participants to try to solve a series of five-letter anagrams while either standing up or lying on a mattress.
²⁵
The anagrams were a mixed bunch—some were relatively simple (“gip” into “pig”) while others were tough (“nodru” into “round”). Interestingly, the volunteers solved the puzzles about 10 percent faster when horizontal and thus achieved a higher score in the allotted time. What caused the difference?

The answer, according to Lipnicki and Byrne, might have to do with a small section of your brain referred to as the locus coeruleus (Latin for “the blue spot”). When activated, this region produces a stress hormone called noradrenaline that, in turn, increases heart rate, triggers the release of energy, and raises blood flow around the body. When you stand up, gravity draws blood away from the upper body, which subsequently increases activity in the locus coeruleus, whereas lying down decreases its activity. Some researchers think that noradrenaline may also impair the brain’s ability to engage in certain types of thinking, including the creativity and flexibility
required to solve anagrams. It seems that the act of adopting an upright or supine (Latin for “can’t be bothered”) position dramatically affects the chemicals racing through your body and causes your brain to operate in quite different ways.

IN 59 SECONDS

Priming

To prime your mind for thinking creatively, spend a few moments describing a typical musician or artist. List their typical behaviors, lifestyle, and appearance. Or, following on from Förster’s work in creativity and patterns, use the following designs to help produce original ideas. They can be turned into examples of modern art and used to adorn the walls of boardrooms and meeting spaces. Alternatively, they can be loaded on computers as wallpaper or even used as subtle background designs on the pads that people use to scribble their ideas. Whatever you choose, creating creativity has never been so quick or easy.

Bodywork

The next time you are trying to be creative in a meeting, gently lean forward and pull against the table. When the going gets tough, cross your arms to help perseverance in the face of failure. If that doesn’t work, lie down. If anyone accuses you of being lazy, quietly explain that you are employing your locus coeruleus in the war against rigid thinking.

attraction

Why you shouldn’t play
hard to get
,
how the
subtle art
of seduction involves
the simplest of
touches
,
roller-coaster
rides, and
avoiding
artificial
Christmas trees

IMAGINE BEING HANDED
a jar containing ten cookies and being asked to remove one, take a nibble, and rate it for quality and taste. Now imagine being asked to perform exactly the same task but this time being handed a jar containing just two cookies. It would seem reasonable to think that the initial number of cookies in each jar wouldn’t affect your ratings. Reasonable but wrong. According to work conducted by psychologist Stephen Worchel at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, cookies taken from a jar that is almost empty taste significantly better than identical cookies taken from a full jar.
¹

Why should this be the case? How much we desire and treasure an object depends, in part, on how easy it is to obtain. A jar crammed full of cookies suggests that the contents are plentiful. In contrast, a nearly empty jar suggests that the cookies are scarce, and therefore significantly more desirable. In Worchel’s experiment, this simple idea unconsciously affected how participants perceived the availability of the cookies and how good they tasted.

Exactly the same effect explains why collectors spend millions on limited editions, people are attracted to books or films that have been banned, and retailers are quick to point out limited stocks. But does it also apply to dating?

It is a question that has taxed some of the world’s greatest minds. The classical Greek philosopher Socrates, when advising the prostitute Theodota on the best way to attract men, clearly preferred the “play hard to get” strategy, noting:

They will appreciate your favors most highly if you wait till they ask for them. The sweetest meats, you see, if served before they are wanted, seem sour, and to those who had enough they are positively nauseating: but even poor fare is very welcome when offered to a hungry man.
²

A few hundred years later the great Roman poet Ovid was moved to agree:

Fool. If you feel no need to guard your girl for her own sake, guard her for mine, so I may want her more. Easy things nobody wants, but what is forbidden is tempting … Anyone who can love the wife of an indolent cuckold, I should suppose, would steal buckets of sand from the shore.
³

The wise words of Socrates and Ovid are echoed in many modern-day books about dating. Time and again, people are advised to play it cool and make any potential love of their life do the running. But does playing hard to get really work?

To find out, Elaine Hatfield from the University of Hawaii and her colleagues conducted a series of fascinating and, at times, odd studies.
⁴
In the first of these, students were shown photographs and brief biographies of teenage couples and asked to rate how desirable they found each member of the couple. The biographies had been carefully constructed to ensure that some of the teenagers appeared to have fallen for their partner after only a couple of dates (think “easy”) while others had taken much longer (think “hard to get”). Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, the students gave much higher ratings to those people who had declared their undying love within moments of meeting their partner, leading them to conclude that it appears that “all the world does love a lover.” Undaunted, the researchers undertook a second, slightly more realistic study.

This time the research team asked a group of women who had signed up with a dating agency to help out. Whenever a man telephoned them for a date, they were asked to respond in one of two ways. On half of the calls they were to accept immediately (“easy”), while the rest of the time they would pause for precisely three seconds before saying yes (“hard to get”). After the call, all of the guys were told that they had taken part in an experiment (“she was faking it”) and asked to rate their dates. Once again, the team discovered that playing hard to get did not affect the ratings. The team then wondered whether the experimental three-second pause had been ambiguous. They decided to make things a little more clear-cut. In yet another study the women with the dating agency either rapidly accepted any offer of a date (“easy”) or paused, explained that they had received countless offers and then rather begrudgingly arranged for just a coffee (“hard to get”). This time, the results revealed absolutely no effect.

Desperate, the researchers did what many people do when the going gets tough in the heady world of dating: they turned to prostitution.
⁵

In a bizarre and little-known social psychology experiment, researchers persuaded a group of prostitutes to chat with their clients in one of two ways. While pouring them a drink before getting down to business, they would either say nothing (“easy”) or casually explain that they were starting college soon and so would subsequently be seeing only the customers who they liked best (“hard to get”). The research team then monitored how many times each client contacted the prostitute during the following month and, yet again, found no relationship between the prostitute playing hard to get and the return rate.

To discover why playing hard to get should prove to be such a myth, Hatfield and the team asked a group of men
whether they would rather date someone who was eager to have a relationship or someone who made others do all of the running. Most said that there were pros and cons for each option. According to the interviewees, “easy” women were relaxing and fun to be with but could be an embarrassment in public. In contrast, hard-to-get women might appear to be a conquest but were often unfriendly, cold, and had a tendency to humiliate you in front of your friends. As a result of the interviews, the researchers speculated that the best strategy would be to give a potential date the impression that in general you were hard to get (and therefore a scarce resource worth having) but really enthusiastic about him or her specifically. They tested this notion by using some of the same techniques (although this time not involving the prostitutes) and found overwhelming evidence to support their hypothesis.

However, being able to attract a mate is not just about conveying the magic “I am choosy, and I have chosen you” impression. Instead, research into the psychology of dating has uncovered a number of equally quick but effective ways of making your attraction to someone a mutual affair. All you need is a simple touch, an afternoon at a theme park, and the confidence to ask people about their favorite pizza topping.

THE POWER OF TOUCH

French psychologist Nicolas Guéguen has spent his career investigating some of the more unusual aspects of everyday life, and perhaps none is more unusual than his groundbreaking work on breasts. For years psychologists have been fascinated by the impact of women’s chests on male brains, and they have carried out a series of studies that have scientifically
proven that men are attracted to women with large breasts. This work, although not surprising, suffers from one significant drawback. Most of it has been undertaken in the relatively artificial confines of the laboratory and has involved presenting men with photographs of women with breasts of various sizes and asking them to select the one that they find most attractive. As a result, whenever this work was presented at academic conferences, other scientists would ask the same question time and again: “Yes, that’s all very well, but does men’s preference for large-breasted women actually exist in real life?”

Enter Nicolas Guéguen.

Guéguen decided to conduct two studies investigating breast size and male behavior in more realistic settings. One of these, subsequently described in his paper “Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation,” involved systematically changing the apparent size of a young woman’s breasts and examining the number of times she was approached by men in a nightclub.
⁶
The woman (who, according to the experimental report, was selected because she had an A-cup bust size and had been rated by male students as having average physical attractiveness) was asked to sit in a nightclub for an hour and look longingly at the dance floor. Meanwhile, a hidden researcher carefully counted the number of men who asked her to dance. Over the course of twelve weeks, the experimenters used latex inserts to vary the woman’s bust size between a B and a C cup. The effect was as dramatic as it was predictable. Without the help of the latex inserts she was approached by men 13 times over the course of a night. When she moved up to an artificial B cup, this frequency rose to 19 times, while the fake C cup resulted in a staggering 44 approaches.

Of course, it could easily be argued that the researchers stacked the deck in their favor. After all, probably most of the men in the nightclub were there to meet women and would have had the time to look at several people before making an approach. What would happen if these factors were removed? What if the context was far less sexual and men had only a few seconds to make up their minds? To find out, Guéguen conducted another experiment, resulting in his article “Bust Size and Hitchhiking: A Field Study.”
⁷