Psychologists in the Netherlands and Germany have recently found that thinking about situations involving love and lust produce very different mindframes when it comes to thinking in general. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Jens Förster, Amina Özelsel and Kai Epstude found that when volunteers were asked to imagine being in love or being in lust — or when they were subliminally prompted to think about love or lust — their states of mind shifted. Love seemed to elicit global and long-range thinking, lust seemed to elicit local or short-term thinking.
There is nothing inherently surprising about this, given that love and lust (to the extent they are different things) differ on the question of temporality. We can imagine ourselves as being in love with someone for a long time, but can think of lust in a short-sighted way. More interestingly, however, the researchers found that getting people to think about love and lust — even when this was done subliminally ie. without the volunteers being aware that were being made to do so — prompted people to evaluate others differently.
The “love” volunteers were more likely to display a kind of blindness that the lust volunteers did not. We use the phrase “blind lust,” but in reality, it is love that tends to be blind. Being made to think about lust prompted the volunteers to pay greater attention to detail and see reality quite clearly. Being made to think about love, on the other hand, prompted the volunteers to slip into a more hazy state. Prior research has shown that people who are in love romanticize their partners, and often see them as being better than they really are, and fail to notice flaws that are actually glaringly obvious. Lovers often report that their partners closely match their own picture of what an ideal partner would be like — even when those descriptions clash with the way the partners describe themselves. Lovers who have inaccurately positive perceptions of their mates report being happier than those who see their partners more clearly.
It’s an example, I suppose, of the hidden brain providing us with a useful bias (which it does quite regularly). Our ability to misperceive reality, to see our partners as better than they really are, helps us build long term relationships that are positive, and end up making us happier. It’s not as if too much more proof were needed on this, but this experiment shows that our minds are designed first and foremost to be adaptive, rather than to be accurate. If it is adaptive for us to misperceive reality, then our minds are only too happy to oblige.
If you are in the Cambridge area tonight — Feb 9 — please come by the Harvard Bookstore at 7 PM to listen to me read from The Hidden Brain, and to discuss the wonderful world that is the human mind.
