Before you go off, confident that you
will avoid falling into the traps of priming or framing by bringing ruthless
rationality to all of your decisions, I have to warn you against turning to an
overly cerebral approach to dating: consciously thinking about your decision
making is perhaps even more dangerous than not thinking at all. There are
probably some among us—I admit to being one—who, when faced with a tough
decision, decide to sit down and write out a list of all the pros and cons so
that we can make an informed choice. Well, I’m here to tell you that this is a
disastrously bad idea and likely to lead to worse decisions, especially if the
subject we are examining is difficult to articulate. Or, as I like to think of
this section, the unexamined life is worth
living!
Imagine that you are given a choice of
five different posters to decorate your room. One of them is a van Gogh, another
is a Monet. The other three are captioned cartoons or photos of animals. Which
do you choose? Researchers ran precisely this study with college students, and,
as you might expect, most people preferred the posters by van Gogh and Monet. No
great surprise there. We probably didn’t need a study to find that the average
college student prefers van Gogh to a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. But
that was not the purpose of the study. Researchers were interested in how
thinking about that decision might alter it, so they asked half of the people
involved to write a short essay explaining what they liked or disliked about the
five posters. Afterward, all of the students were allowed to choose one of the
posters and then take it home.
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