演变，情感与理性：爱

Student: The people who would take the rickety bridge might be more likely to be more

[inaudible]

Dean Peter Salovey: People who take the rickety bridge might be the kind of people who are more looking for adventure than the people who take the solid bridge. Right. Another way of saying it is there isn't random assignment of the subjects to the two conditions in the study. That's no random

assignment; it's not an experiment. You--By not randomly assigning people to these two conditions, you may be capturing just individual differences in the kind of person who, when there's a perfectly stable, safe, low bridge, says, \to go on the bridge where I have to risk my life to get to class.\surprise us that that's the kind of person who would call a perfect stranger on the telephone and write a sexy story and give it to them? [laughter] Right? We're not so surprised. So what we have

to do, of course, is take it in to the lab and do this in a more systematic way with random assignment. And this is how I'll want to finish up today. We have until 2:45, 3:45? Okay. Great. I'll

take about five more minutes to finish up and that'll give us some time for questions.

So how do you do this in the lab? Well, you can bring people in to the lab and I can present you with a confederate who--Let's say you are all in condition one, everybody on this side of the room, and I can say to all of you, \you're waiting please fill out this form.\are to the experimenter, to me. I can do the same thing over here. I can give you the form and ask you to rate how attractive you think I am and I can give you the same instruction with a crucial difference: \

out these forms while you wait.\

7 b# d/ f! z, J/ [$ What happens? The people who got the painful shock instruction are more likely to find the confederate attractive. [laughter] Why? While they're sitting there thinking about painful shock it's making their heart beat faster, [sound of heartbeat] it's making their palms sweat, it's making them breathe harder maybe. And even though it's fairly obvious what's doing that, they still misattribute that arousal to \

instruction.

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You can do this in other ways. You can bring--Here is one of my favorite ones. You bring people in the lab. We'll make them the control group this time. We bring you in the--to the lab and we say to this group of people, \out these forms in the meantime.\now in the experimental group and I say, \

moment. I'm going to ask you to fill out some forms but first, to get ready for this experiment, I'd like you to get on this treadmill and run for ten minutes.\just sat around. The people who've run on the treadmill, even when that arousal is fairly obvious, you've got--you--doing a little bit of aerobic exercise, you still find the experimenter more attractive. Okay? This is why the fourth floor of Payne Whitney Gym is such a dangerous place [laughter] and I urge you as your dean to be very careful there. [laughter] Okay? It's that

combination of aerobic exercise and spandex [laughter] that leads to trouble.

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All right. Now, here's the final experiment and I apologize for this. It is a bit sexist in 2007 context, but let me explain. And we could never do this--and one could never do this experiment today but let me go through it with you and you'll apologize for its--some of its qualities. In this experiment male subjects were brought in to the lab and they were asked to look at centerfolds from Playboy magazine. So, these are essentially photographs of naked women. And they are wearing headphones that amplify their heartbeat and they are asked among other things how attracted are they to the centerfold photograph that they're looking at. So, maybe--I don't

remember how many they look at. Maybe it's about 10.

So, these slides are coming up. They've got the headphones on. The headphones are amplifying their heartbeat and the slides are moving one after another for a few seconds each slide and they're listening to their heartbeat. [sound of heartbeat] Slide one. Slide two. Slide three. Slide four. Slide five. Slide six. And then they're asked which one did you find most attractive, which one are you most attracted to? \And what has happened is they're using this bodily cue of their heartbeat to infer that that's who

they find more attractive.

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Now, here is the twist. They're not actually listening to their heartbeat. They're listening to a tape recording of a heartbeat. And the experimenter is back there with the speed knob [laughter] and at random intervals he just speeds up the tape of their heart [laughter] and then slows it down. And it doesn't matter which slide he speeds up the tape of the heartbeat on, that's the one the subject is more likely to think is the person of their dreams, the person they're attracted to. So even you can misattribute real arousal. You can even misattribute phony arousal, arousal that isn't even coming from your body. It's just coming--It's just being played to you randomly. You can even misattribute

that.

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Okay. I think these experiments are cute and I think there's an interesting phenomenon there. And

it says something, in a way, about how easily we can be misled as to what things in our environment, even things coming from our own body, mean. But there's also some very serious implications of this kind of work. One of them has to do with domestic violence. So think about

domestic violence situations and why people stay in them. Why do people stay in relationships that are violent? Now the number one reason, and we have to acknowledge it up front, is usually economically there's no alternative or people believe there's no alternative. \if I leave I'd be homeless. If I leave I will starve, if my--if I leave my kids will starve or there'll be danger to my kids.\

one, but what else might be going on?

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Sometimes people don't realize that the relationship they're in is abusive--it's psychologically or emotionally abusive. They get into these fights and screaming matches and name-calling and such even if it's not physical violence. And they feel a certain arousal when that happens and they misattribute it. \They misattribute that, what might be anger, what might even be aggression and violence, to an

expression of love.

I have a friend who's a social psychologist who told me a story once that really made me very nervous, although she's fine. She said, \ago--\arguments and one time something happened where he came up to my car in a parking lot and he was yelling at me through the window. And I rolled up the window and before you know it he had punched out the window.\And he--she said to me, \I--and, all joking aside, that's scary but that's misattributed arousal. \I felt something and I assumed it was love. What she was misattributing as love--Well, she was misattributing his aggressive response as love. She was misattributing her own fear as mutual attraction, as \

they are fun to talk about because they are unusual and cute, there is also some serious implications of this kind of work that one might think about. And you might think about other possible implications as well. Okay. Let me stop there and see what kinds of questions we might

have. [applause]

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Dean Peter Salovey: Thank you. Thanks very much. That's very kind of you. Because we are on

tape I'll repeat any questions that come in. Yeah.

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Student: [inaudible]

Dean Peter Salovey: Right. So the question is in experiments like the painful shock experiment if you are told in advance, like you all are, through a consent form or by the experimenter, \an experiment involving painful shock,\will you not be able to misattribute the arousal? It is true. The more salient we make the source of the arousal, the less likely you can get the effect. If in my thought experiment I say to my friend, \barista made a mistake and gave you caffeinated espresso when you asked for decaf or maybe you just love me.\think oh, caffeine, yeah. That's the parsimonious explanation here.\you make the cause of the arousal, the less likely you'll get the effect but you can see even in experiments where the cause of the arousal is somewhat obvious, at least to us, you can still get a

misattribution effect. Other questions. Yes.

Student: [inaudible]

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Dean Peter Salovey: Yeah. So the question is are any of these factors, particularly the big three, proximity, familiarity, and similarity--Do they affect the maintenance of relationships or just the initial attraction? It's interesting. My guess is they affect both initial and maintenance over time but the literature mostly focuses on initial attraction, much richer data on that initial attraction and those initial stages of the relationship in part because it's a little hard to follow couples over time. Imagine the sort of Heisenberg-esque problems we would get carefully following romantic couples over time and interfering with them to ask questions and make observations. It would be hard to let this couple naturally--this relationship naturally unfold. So, we really get--So, really the focus of many of these experiments is on initial attraction. That's why I always say my lecture is on love, the definition of terms is about love, but the experiments really are much more about

attraction than about love. Another question. Yes.

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& M T5 O8 M- M9 |Student: Can someone feel consummate love for more than one person?

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Dean Peter Salovey: Oh. Can someone feel consummate love for more than one person? That's a very good question. It's actually a question that's debated in the literature. I didn't get into it at all in this experiment--in this lecture--but there's an interesting debate going on about love and many other emotions between people who take a kind of evolutionary perspective on these states versus people who take what might be called a more socially constructed perspective. And these aren't necessarily so incompatible but the evolutionary perspective I think would argue that you can feel that kind of love for more than one person or at least it would facilitate the passing on of your

genetic material to a larger array of the next generation. So I think the evolutionary explanation is not a problem but we have constructed a world where in most societies, except for very unusual polygamist societies, the belief is that you can't love more than one. Right. And so you've got this tension between what might be evolutionarily wired impulses and the kind of social constraints that say this isn't good, this isn't appropriate, this is taboo. And my guess is the result is yes, you could but you're not going to feel un-conflicted about it and it's because these two are conflicting each other at the same time. How about one more question and then we'll let you go? I'm sorry. I

saw him first.

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Student: Wouldn't natural selection favor the people who learn all these things and then practically

try to apply them?

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Dean Peter Salovey: So he's making the evolutionary argument. Wouldn't natural selection favor the people who take introductory psychology, come to my Valentine's Day lecture, listen carefully to the big three and the more interesting four, and then go out there and put them into practice? It feels a little bit like the--like we're trying to pass on an acquired characteristic, which is a little bit counter to Darwinian theory but if somehow you could design a proclivity for learning this kind of material, evolution might indeed favor it. I can tell you this much. It would make the several thousands social psychologists in this world very happy and proud of their field, if that turned out

to be true. Anyway, thank you all very much. Happy Valentine's Day! Thanks!

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[end of transcript]