Dan Ariely has more interesting things to say. Once again, this is serious academic research performed by people from Harvard Business School and MIT. It’s the type of stuff that I always somehow knew or felt instinctively, but the social pressure was to dismiss it as inappropriate.
- people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, but in fact acquiring more information about others leads to less liking. In the process of learning, dissimilarities are discovered and this leads to disliking. Of course, I mentioned just a few posts ago how sitting with someone you harbor a crush for makes that crush just go away. This is why strangers in the night/on the bus/on the plane are always attractive. Forcing individuals to interact with strongly disliked others does increase liking (regression to the mean), yet in real life such situations are avoided and a potential for defusing disliking is lost;
- at first acquaintance, individuals read into others what they wish;
- decisions are difficult because outcomes are uncertain (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; these psychologists got the Nobel prize in economics for their insight into decision making, so this is not voodoo NLP ’science’);
- the excitement of anticipating a first encounter can heighten positive expectations;
- similarity to the self (from shared traits and values to trivial things like shared birthdays) his highly diagnostic of liking;
- in absence of information, people assume similarity with others, hence propensity to liking; however, initial evidence of dissimilarity causes subsequent information to be further evidence of dissimilarity and thus cause disliking;
(maybe this is the man without qualities? I should read Robert Musil perhaps).
- this bears repeating: the increase in knowledge leads to decrease in liking. More so for women than for men;
- knowledge is different from exposure without learning: sitting in the same room with someone repeatedly will create a kind of kinship which will increase liking. But that is not acquiring information about that person;
- propinquity - how near people live to each other - predicts the emergence of friendships, but even more so the emergence of enmities;
- partners (romantic and otherwise) who play hard to get are desirable; individuals who demonstrate unconcealed romantic interest seem desperate and unappealing; romantic interest should be dyadic - targeted at one individual and eliciting the same response (it does somehow) - rather then being broadcast… and this broadcasting may be unfortunately unconscious;
- people have limited insight into their own behavior under drive-states (e.g. obsessions, alcohol). Hence self control should be proactive - don’t put yourself in that situation - rather than reactive, assuming you will handle the situation well. Decisions will be stigmatized as immoral behavior by people who would themselves make the same mistake in the same drive-state.
Heady, crucial insights. My takeaway: never put yourself in a situation where you are not at overwhelming advantage. The Chinese strategists knew this all along but somehow in the West the romantic view of the heroic struggle is more widely disseminated - with disastrous effects.
