Behavior/Humans

Why Attractive People Seem to Be So Scarce?

Value heuristic

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

18th of February 2008, 19:06 GMT

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Don't you have the impression that all the people that would make a very attractive partner for you are either involved in a relationship or homosexual? It's like there are no right partners for you in this world.

But a new research published in the journal of "Psychological Science"

by a team at INSEAD, the international business school with campuses in France and Singapore, shows that this is more inside your mind than in reality, due to the "value heuristic." This is a kind of cognitive shortcut, or "rule of thumb", that we employ when we cannot make a really informed decision.

There is a deep connection in the human mind between scarcity and value: gold is valuable because it is rare, as useful tools cannot be made from it. The rarer a bird species, the more costly it is (and this dooms many species to extinction). The psychologists show that this is so deeply impregnated in our brains, that we unconsciously believe, in case of crucial decisions, that what's valuable cannot be abundant.

To check the value heuristic, the team put the young subjects to watch in random order 100 images, 50 of birds and 50 of flowers. The subjects were said after that they would receive a few cents either for each bird picture or for each flower picture they had seen.

Those paid for recalling flower images said unanimously there were less flowers than birds, and vice-versa, those having to recall birds said they were less than flowers. No individual could say the right number of flowers and birds. The experimentally-induced yearning provoked a fake sense of scarcity.

In other tests, the subjects watched images of both sexes, some individuals being attractive and some not. Later, the subjects, men and women, said there were less attractive people of the opposite sex than those of the same sex, even if the number of images was the same. In the case of unattractive faces, the fake sense of scarcity did not appear. The subjects' emotional desire made them think that the object of their desire was less likely to be encountered.

This study shows that people think based on deeply rooted judgmental heuristics when assessing the abundance of their target issues, fact that makes them take wrong decisions compared to what reality offers.

TAGS:

attractive | human | behavior

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