Decoding Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

had gotten serious about finding someone to marry, she and a girlfriend decided to meet for lunch to analyze every new candidate. While the lunches themselves proved enjoyable, they were no help at all when it came to her dating. Forced to state exactly why she should or shouldn’t keep seeing someone, she developed increasingly bizarre criteria. She realized things were getting out of hand when she found herself rejecting one man because his ears were too low on his head. She called off the lunches and now tries to curb her need to talk about her dates.
     
    Not only do we do a poor job of figuring out what is important to us about other people, we also don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we think. In one study, people were asked to describe how other people viewed them. The average correlation between how people thought they were viewed and how they were actually viewed was a distinctly lackluster 0.40 or so (one would mean perfect correlation, and zero would mean no correlation). So, for example, your view of how giving you are agrees only modestly with how giving your friends think you are—and chances are that your friends are closer to the truth. Other studies have confirmed that the people around us usually have a more accurate picture of our personality than we do, and they are also better at predicting how we will behave.
     
    This doesn’t mean that you should rely on these friends to tell you whether or not you should date someone (as we’ve just seen, there are some serious pitfalls to this approach), but it might not be a bad idea to get their help clarifying what will make you happy in a relationship. You may think that you don’t care very much about a certain quality, such as thoughtfulness, but your friend may be able to remind you of the intense frustration you have felt toward everyone who lacks that quality. You may also think that something is desperately important, while your friend can remind you that your last partner had that quality, and it didn’t make you any less unhappy. One woman admitted that she almost decided to end the relationship with the man she eventually married until one of her friends chided her for undervaluing the importance of kindness.
     

YOU WORE RED—NO, I WORE BLUE. AH, YES, I REMEMBER IT WELL.
     
    Given all of this, it won’t come as any great surprise that our memory is not particularly reliable, either, and we are likely to recall events in a number of deeply inaccurate ways that have profound implications for dating. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his ingenious work on these issues, has discovered that we don’t remember an experience with equal intensity throughout. We tend to remember it at its most intense, and we tend to remember the end—what Kahneman has dubbed the “peak-end” rule. In a sign of just how far scientists are willing to go to understand this phenomenon, they did a study of men who underwent colonoscopy exams. Needless to say, having a tube with a camera (thank God for miniaturization!) inserted into your rectum and then being poked and prodded with it for several minutes is not a pleasant experience, and this unpleasantness is itself significant—people will skip regular testing to avoid it, despite the medical benefits. So, if doctors could find a way to make the experience less unpleasant, patients might be more willing to have the procedure. Researchers decided to take advantage of Kahneman’s peak-end rule. One group received the standard colonoscopy. The second group also received the standard colonoscopy with one twist (well, not a literal twist—that would be most uncomfortable). After the exam was over, the doctor left the scope in for a brief period of at least twenty seconds. Although still not enjoyable, those final moments were much less distressing than when the scope was being moved around. But the proof is in the, er, pudding. How did the extra time affect the patients? Kahneman’s theory