As psychology advances its understanding of the mind and brain, perhaps the last bastion of mystery about why we do what we do remains our perplexing behaviour around love and romance.
But a series of recent research findings have thrown light on the enigma of attraction, leaving tools for those among us who would rather not leave seduction to chance.
For example, a favourite ritual on Valentine’s Day is the romantic candle-lit dinner – but why exactly is romance so strongly associated with abnormally low lighting conditions? One theory is that in dim light your pupils dilate to help you see better, but we actually confuse the dilated pupils of our date peering at us through the candle wax with romantic interest, because dilated pupils are also a feature of aroused attraction.
Psychologists established as far back as 1965 in a classic study of pupil size and attraction, that men found women’s faces to be more attractive when the pupils were rendered larger, a finding that has been reliably replicated since. But just before you take a couple of low wattage bulbs to your favourite restaurant, the latest research by psychologists Selina Tombs and Irwin Silverman of York University in Toronto found that while men prefer dilated pupils in women, most women prefer only moderately dilated pupils in a man.
Their argument for this intriguing finding, recently published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, uses evolutionary theory to suggest that male reproductive success is mainly limited by access to willing, fertile females. Women are much more cautious, perhaps because a liaison always involves the risk of pregnancy and all the emotional and physical costs that entails.
So men have been programmed by natural selection to respond without much equivocation to female sexual arousal. Evolutionary theory therefore predicts that an obviously enthusiastic woman is much more attractive to a man than vice versa.
If men are willing to mate without as much emotional investment, a woman’s interests are probably better served by moderate levels of male arousal at the beginning of a relationship, argue Tombs and Silverman.
In our evolutionary past, overzealous sexual attention on the part of men may have presaged forced copulation, over- possessiveness, excessive sexual jealousy and/or promiscuity, all of which can operate to the detriment of women’s interests. Thus, Tombs and Silverman suggest that women have been programmed by natural selection over many generations, to prefer “steady moderation” in the sexual attentions and arousal of prospective suitors.
Consequently, during that romantic meal, men should sit somewhere where the light is slightly better to ensure that their pupils aren’t too big and they aren’t signalling too much zeal to the woman.
This need for moderation in male ardour to maximise attractiveness has also been confirmed by new research into the best vocal strategies to adopt during dating.
Sandy Pentland and colleagues at the Affective Computing Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysed conversations during speed dating sessions and discovered that they could predict with 80 per cent accuracy which couples were going to be attracted to each other, simply from the way they spoke to each other.
If men used frequent encouraging interjections in a conversation that lasted less than a second – typically words or phrases such as “OK”, “I see” and “go on” – women were more likely to report attraction at the end of the date.
The key here is not for the man to talk too much, and therefore give away too much neediness in so doing.
For women, the more they varied the pitch of their voice, the more they elicited attraction from men. Perhaps pitch variability is a signal of emotional involvement from a woman, while the encouraging short interjections indicate a man who listens encouragingly and therefore is one on whom the woman is more likely to make an impact.
Many will be sceptical of modern psychological theories that boil romance down to a basic drive to pass on our genes to the next generation, but the problem is that these theories offer some ingenious explanations for otherwise mysterious aspects of love. For if we don’t apply evolutionary psychology, how then do we explain why women wear blusher or rouge on their cheeks? The use of red ochre as a cosmetic has been confirmed in archaeological digs dating back long before the dawn of civilisation and there is, perhaps, a good evolutionary reason for this.
One intriguing theory is that during ovulation, there is slight dilation of the female’s blood vessels, bringing a redder blush to her skin. Adding red colour to the face makes a prospective male believe that she is ovulating. From the man’s standpoint this is a good time to try to seduce a woman in order to maximise his chances of passing on his genes to the next generation via an achieved pregnancy.
Another theory is that back in the caves, if some women were ovulating and therefore getting all the male attention, it made sense for the others to add red to the skin in order to confuse the men as to who was really at their most fertile, therefore ensuring you weren’t shut out from the mating game at particular times of the month.
If the modern wearing of cosmetics can be explained by evolutionary theory, could the fact we also evolved in more dangerous times have a much greater impact on our mating psychology than we realise? For example, the search for safe rather than risky activities should theoretically lead us to be attracted to those who are more similar to us.
This has been confirmed by recent research showing that we prefer romantically those whose faces structurally resemble our own. And it doesn’t stop there – other similarities, even the spelling of first and second names, seem to affect the extent to which we are attracted to people. These remarkable findings reflect a new theory in psychology which explains our unconscious preferences in life and is referred to as implicit egotism.
Implicit egotism is the idea that people’s positive associations about themselves spill over into their evaluations of objects associated with the self. The theory started when psychologist Maurice Carvallo and colleagues at the State University of New York in Buffalo asked participants to sample two cups of tea. Unbeknown to the subjects the first three letters in the name of one of the two teas were engineered to match the first three letters in participants’ first names (for instance, a person named Sandra might receive a tea named Sanya and a tea with a name totally unrelated to her name). When asked to choose a tea to take home as a gift, participants preferred the tea that contained their name letters. During debriefing afterwards, most of the participants reported that the names of the teas played no role in their preferences. Yet the name-letter preference was very reliable even among those who insisted that the name of the tea played absolutely no role in their decision.
The interesting thing about implicit egotism is that unlike plain egotism, it acts below the level of conscious awareness and is therefore harder to guard against as a persuasion or manipulation tactic. One theory is that implicit egotism constitutes a non-conscious safety signal that encourages people to connect to objects and other people who resemble themselves. In short, the least self-threatening person most people know is themself.
People who resemble the self may, by association, be deemed non-threatening as well. Most situations in which people are introduced to a potential mate are inherently threatening. Among other things, this anxiety may be the result of a concern with creating a certain impression on others, or the fear of rejection.
The idea that threat or anxiety is a key component of the implicit egotism effect has now been tested in a study just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by psychologist John Jones and colleagues from the State University of New York, where subjects rated their liking for various personal ads.
In one experiment, a group of participants was asked, before evaluating the ads, to write three lines on their own biggest personal drawbacks or weaknesses as a potential dating partner. This was designed to make those participants more worried about their own desirability before coming to decide which personal ads they were most attracted to. Sure enough, under such “self-concept threat” there was a much stronger attraction to those personal ads where names had been manipulated covertly to include more letters of the names of the evaluator. Harry rated Harriet as more attractive.
So if you want to extract the maximum bang for your buck (so to speak) from the implicit egotism theory, you need to introduce some good “self-concept” threat into your date on February 14. Psychologists have come up with an experiment that provides just the answer.
In one of the most famous demonstrations in social psychology, John Stapert and Gerald Clore at the University of Illinois back in 1969 set up a series of “dates” in which participants, briefed beforehand by the experimenter, spent the entire date agreeing or disagreeing with a subject who was unaware of the true purpose of the experiment. The subjects either found themselves on a nightmare date where everything they said was vehemently contradicted by their “date”, or a more pleasant experience where the date agreed throughout the evening with any proposition the subject asserted. It will come as no surprise that when asked to rate the attractiveness of the date the subject found those who agreed with them more attractive than the constant contradictors.
Then the experimenter threw in a third condition: in this date the collaborating participants started the evening disagreeing and then half way through switched to agreeing. In this final scenario of initial disagreement followed by sudden agreement, the date was found most attractive of all – much more attractive than if they had merely agreed throughout the session. This experiment may be famous within the cloisters of academic psychology but has remained stubbornly obscure to the outside world. Yet the theories which explain this dramatic and counterintuitive effect could be used with some practical benefit on Valentine’s Day.
One theory is that the experience of sudden agreement after much disagreement makes you feel that you have had an impact on your date and this is found very attractive. Another theory is that finding yourself in such a situation of constant disagreement is extremely threatening and raises your anxiety. Consequently the switch to agreement produces dramatic relief, the positive emotion which you may partly mistake for attraction. If we reinterpret the experiment with what we now know from the new attraction theory of Brett Pelham, Mauricio Carvallo and colleagues based on implicit egotism, it suggests that a sense of threat and anxiety was created at first with the disagreement, which leads us to find any similarity or agreement much more attractive afterwards.
Stapert and Clore then manipulated the experiment so that the knowing-participant timed the switch to disagreement to later and later in the date. The longer it took, the greater the attraction. It could be that you don’t even have to go as far as generating “self-concept threat” – any stress will do. Cindy Meston and colleagues at the University of Texas, in a recent paper entitled “Love at first fright” published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, confirmed that attraction to a stranger increased after a ride on a scary roller-coaster compared with that which existed before.
Maybe stress adds to attraction because of the “any port in a storm” theory that our standards for affiliation drop dramatically in a crisis. When the lift or the train grinds to a halt, even strangers start talking to each other. If these new theories are true, they go a long way to explaining why so much effort spent on relaxing charming Valentine’s dates won’t actually generate the romantic excitement anticipated.
They lend credence to the idea that forces beneath the level of conscious awareness are indeed a vital part of attraction and much ignored as a tactic by the innocent, unaware of how manipulative romance could fall into the hands of the Machiavellian evolutionary psychologist.
Dr Raj Persaud is Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London and author of ‘The Motivated Mind’ (Bantam Press, £12.99)
