In his book
Influence,
the psychologist Robert Cialdini, from Arizona State University,
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makes a fascinating link between this work and a highly unusual experiment exploring the use of plastic surgery in prisons. In the late 1960s, a group of prisoners in a New York City jail were given plastic surgery to correct various facial disfigurements. Researchers discovered that these prisoners were significantly less likely to return to prison than a control group of prisoners with uncorrected facial disfigurements. The degree of rehabilitation, such as education and training, did not seem to matter. Instead, looks appeared to be everything. This result caused some social policymakers to argue that societal stereotyping was causing some people to turn to a life of crime, and that changing the way they looked had provided an effective way of preventing them from offending again. This may have been the case. However, Cialdini used the data obtained by John Stewart to argue for another interpretation of the results. It was possible that the corrective surgery had little effect on whether they re-offended, but simply meant that they were less likely to be sent to prison.
THE HIDDEN INFLUENCE OF HOLLYWOOD
Research shows that we link looks with likeability. Whenever we see an attractive face, we unconsciously associate it with traits such as “kindness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence.” Good-looking people are more likely to be offered jobs than their ugly competitors, and to be given higher salaries than their equally competent colleagues.
But where do these sorts of irrational effects come from and why do they persist? Some researchers place the blame firmly at the door of Hollywood. Stephen Smith, from North Georgia College, and his colleagues decided to discover whether this was true. In the first of two highly revealing experiments, the researchers collected twenty of the top-grossing films for each decade between 1940 and 1989.
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They then asked a group of people to watch the films, rating all the characters identified by name on various scales, including how attractive they were, how moral, how intelligent, how friendly, and whether they lived happily ever afterward. After sitting through everything from
It’s a Wonderful Life
to
Around the World in 80 Days
(the 1956 version), and
Last Tango in Paris
to
Beetlejuice,
the raters evaluated 833 characters. The researchers discovered that physically attractive characters were depicted as more romantically active, morally good, intelligent, and far more likely than others to live happily every after.
Although interesting, this doesn’t prove that such depictions cause stereotypical thinking. To investigate this, the experimenters conducted a second study. They chose a few films that either did or didn’t portray attractive people in a stereotypical way. For example,
Pride of the Yankees
relates the true-life story of the famous baseball player Lou Gehrig. A good-looking Gary Cooper played Gehrig, showing his success on the field, and how in the prime of his life Gehrig begins having serious health problems but deals with the illness with incredible dignity. At the opposite end of the spectrum came films such as
Up the Down Staircase,
in which a young and spirited teacher tries to make a difference in a troubled inner-city school. Sandy Dennis, who played the lead in the film, was a highly acclaimed actress. However, unlike other stars, such as Gary Cooper, she did not look like a classic Hollywood idol and tended to stammer her way through lines.
Groups of people were asked to watch one of the films and rate certain aspects of it. Then they were asked to help out with a second study. They were told that a nearby university wanted people to rate the qualifications of various graduate students. Each member of the group was presented with a folder containing a resume and a photograph of a student. In reality, all the resumes were identical, but were accompanied by one of two pictures—one showing an attractive person and the other showing an unattractive one. Those who had just seen
Pride of the Yankees,
or a film like it, assigned especially high ratings to the attractive candidate, and especially low ratings to the unattractive candidate. The effect disappeared when the researchers examined the corresponding data from participants who had seen
Up the Down Staircase
or similar films. Just on the showing of one film, people’s perception had changed significantly. Although they weren’t aware of it, the stereotypes depicted in the film had seeped into their brains and affected the way they saw others. The experiment involved just one film. It is not difficult to imagine the effects of a lifetime of watching thousands of similarly biased television shows, advertisements, and movies.
IF YOU WERE A PIZZA TOPPING, WHAT WOULD YOU BE?
Knowing how your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by subtle factors allows you to use information to your own advantage. For example, right now, millions of single people all over the world are desperate to find the perfect partner (or, for many, any partner at all). The good news is that help is at hand. For several years, researchers have been exploring how an understanding of the psychology of attraction can help budding Casanovas impress others. Like so much of the strange science described here, the work has not been carried out in laboratories but in the real world: during speed-dating events, in personal ads, and, as with our starting point, high above a river in British Columbia.
In 1974, two psychology professors, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron, conducted an unusual study on two bridges above the Capilano River in British Columbia.
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One was a swaying footbridge suspended about two hundred feet above the rocks; the other was much lower, and more solidly built. Young men walking across each of the bridges were stopped by a female experimenter posing as a market researcher. The woman asked the men to complete a simple questionnaire, and then offered them her telephone number in case they would like to find out more about her work. As predicted by the experimenters, the offer of the telephone number was not only accepted by significantly more men on the high bridge, but a greater proportion of men on the high bridge subsequently telephoned the female experimenter. Why should someone’s position above the Capilano River have anything to do with that person’s accepting the telephone number of a woman and then calling her for a chat?
Prior to the bridge study, researchers had confirmed what poets had suspected for hundreds of years. When a person finds someone attractive, the heart beats faster as the body prepares itself for potential action. Dutton and Aron wondered whether the opposite was true—that people whose hearts were already beating faster would be more likely to find someone attractive. Hence the experiment on the two bridges. The precarious nature of the high, swaying bridge meant that people using this way of crossing the river had higher heart rates than those on the lower bridge. When the men on the high bridge were approached by the female market researcher, they unconsciously attributed their increased heart rates to her rather than to the bridge. As a result, their bodies fooled their brains into thinking that they found her attractive, and so were more likely to accept her telephone number and subsequently give her a call. In addition to showing how the body can deceive the brain, the results have an important implication for our lives. This is why, when you want someone to fall in love with you, some scholars believe that you and your date should stay away from calming New Age music, country walks, and wind chimes. Instead, your chances of success are increased by attending a rock concert, riding on a roller coaster, or watching a frightening film.
The work conducted by Dutton and Aron is just one of several unusual experiments exploring the psychology of love and attraction. Other work has tackled the rather thorny issue of pick-up lines.
If you really want to impress a potential date, what is the best opening gambit? Searching the Internet certainly won’t help, with the most frequently cited lines likely to depress rather than impress (“Is it hot in here or is it just you?” “If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put U and I together,” and “I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?”). To help discover the pick-up lines most likely to attract a potential partner, researchers from the University of Edinburgh had people rate various types of classic openings.
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The results showed that straight appeals for sex (“Well, hey there, I may not be Fred Flintstone, but I bet I can make your Bed Rock!”) and compliments (“So there you are! I’ve been looking all over for
you,
the girl of my dreams”) did not play big. In fact, they were so unsuccessful that the researchers wondered why they should have evolved at all. After much head scratching, they concluded that these lines might be “used by men to identify sociosexually unrestricted women” (think “tart”). Instead, lines suggesting a potential for spontaneous wit, a pleasant personality, wealth, and an appreciation of culture were much more effective. The study was all well and good, but, as the authors themselves admit, it is one thing to check the “yes, that is a good pick-up line” box on an anonymous questionnaire and quite another to make the decision in real life.
I recently teamed up with the Edinburgh International Science Festival with my academic colleagues James Houran and Caroline Watt to examine the best pick-up lines and conversational topics when searching for the love of your life. The project revolved around a large-scale, experimental, speed-dating event.
A few months before the event, we issued a media appeal for single people who wished to participate in a study exploring the science of seduction. We had about five hundred replies, and invited a hundred randomly selected participants (fifty men and fifty women) to our love laboratory.
The event took place in a large beautiful ballroom at one of Edinburgh’s oldest and most palatial hotels. At the beginning of the evening, our one hundred participants arrived and were randomly seated at one of five long tables. At each table, men were seated on one side, women on the other. The people at four of the tables were asked to talk about a specified topic throughout all their speed dates. We chose four of the most frequently used topics: hobbies, film, travel, and books. Our fifth table acted as a “control,” and we allowed the people there to chat about whatever they liked. As we started to play the romantic strains of Carole King, each person was asked to chat to the person opposite them. Three minutes later, participants were asked to rate their potential beaus. Did they find them physically attractive? What was the level of “chemistry” between them? How quickly had they made up their minds? And, perhaps most important, would they like to meet each other again? A few moments later, everyone was paired up with a different person, and the entire procedure repeated again. Two hours and ten speed dates later, the experiment was over. It proved to be a huge success, and lots of people were hanging around in the bar afterward. Some shared their telephone numbers with one another.
The following day, we entered more than 1,500 pages of data into a giant spreadsheet. Whenever two people had indicated that they would be happy to meet up again, we sent them each others’ telephone numbers. Around 60 percent of those attending walked away with the contact details of at least one other person. Some people did really well, with about 20 percent getting the details of four others. Women proved to be about twice as picky as men, but the top-rated man and woman of the evening had a 100 percent success rate: All their dates wanted to meet them again.
The conversation topics had produced different success rates. When talking about movies, less than 9 percent of the pairs wanted to meet up again, compared to 18 percent when participants spoke about the top topic—travel. A clue to why would-be lovers might want to avoid chatting about movies comes from additional data from the study. At the beginning of the evening, we asked everyone to indicate their favorite types of films. The results revealed that men and women have very different tastes. For instance, 49 percent of men liked action films compared to just 18 percent of women, and 29 percent of women liked musicals, compared to only 4 percent of men. Whenever I walked past the table where participants were talking about films, all I heard was arguing. In contrast, the conversations about travel tended to revolve around great holidays and dream destinations, and that makes people feel good and so appear more attractive to one another.
The data also revealed other surprises. Although men are traditionally seen as shallow people who judge women very quickly, our findings suggested that women were making up their minds much sooner than men, with 45 percent of women’s decisions being made in less than thirty seconds, compared to just 22 percent of men’s decisions. Since a man has only a few seconds to impress a woman, his opening comments are important.
To uncover the best type of pick-up lines, we compared the conversations of participants rated as very desirable by their dates with those seen as especially undesirable. Failed Casanovas either tended to employ old chestnuts (“Do you come here often?”) or else struggled to impress with comments such as “I have a PhD in computing” and “My friend is a helicopter pilot.” Those more skilled in seduction encouraged their dates to talk about themselves in an unusual, fun, quirky way. The most memorable lines from the top-rated man and woman in the study illustrate the point. The top-rated male’s best line was: “If you were on
Stars in Their Eyes
, who would you be?”; the top-rated female asked: “If you were a pizza topping, what would you be?”