The Evidence

Seven experiments into how attraction is manufactured — arousal, proximity, concealment, and the face.

A course on the thought of The Machinery of Desire.

What you will learn

• Explain what an operational definition is and why a science of love had to begin with one.
• State what Aron and Fisher's scanner found and why 'a drive, not an emotion' is the claim their data supports.
• Describe the oxytocin study's design, including its comparison group and its follow-up.
• State the serotonin finding, its source, and why this course does not build an argument on it.
• Reconstruct the bridge study's design including both bridges, both interviewers, and both measures.
• Explain why the male-interviewer condition is what makes the arousal interpretation possible, and why the reanalysis still contests it.
• State the mere-exposure hypothesis in Zajonc's own terms and say what 'mere' is doing in it.
• Explain why the black-bag story is an illustration and not evidence, and what Zajonc offered instead.

Course outline

1. Putting a Feeling on a Scale — How love became a thing that could be measured — and what the first scans found when they looked for it, which was not an emotion.
2. The Chemistry of a Compulsion — What circulates in the blood of new lovers, and why the closest clinical neighbour to early romantic love is not happiness.
3. The Bridge — The most famous study in the psychology of attraction, its three parts, the control condition that almost nobody reports — and the reanalysis that says it does not show what it is famous for showing.
4. Just Being There — The least romantic finding in the literature, and one of the most robust: that being encountered repeatedly is enough, on its own, to be liked.
5. The Veil — Why being wanted is beaten by not being sure — the paper whose first five experiments all failed, and a painting destroyed by one shoulder strap.
6. The Face — They measured personality, aptitude, self-acceptance and class rank at a freshman dance, and exactly one variable predicted anything — then spent a century finding out what it was made of.
7. What People Say They Want — The largest survey of mate preference ever run, the reanalysis of its own data that reached the opposite conclusion, and the evening that showed stated preferences predict nothing about who anybody…

Works read in this course

• Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure (1968) — Zajonc's monograph gathering four kinds of evidence that repeated exposure alone raises liking.
• Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883) — Galton's book of measurements of human difference, including the composite photographs.
• Memories of My Life (1908) — Galton's autobiography, containing his account of ranking the women of British cities.

Terms introduced

operational definition, misattribution of arousal, mere exposure, confound

Part of the Simposeum course library.