Decoding Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

she was indeed popular. Even after the men ended their experiment (although without telling her anything about it), she continued to behave with self-assurance. But here is the really amazing part—even the men who “conducted” the experiment came to see her in the same way, so fully had her demeanor been transformed. If only someone would secretly hire the people around us to treat us not as we are but as we wish to be, we might all become the people we aspire to be.
     

HOW FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE WINNING THE LOTTERY—BUT NOT IN THE WAY THAT YOU THINK
     
    The point of all of this is not to befuddle you—befuddling though the working of the mind often is. Some people might read this chapter and be tempted to redouble their efforts to impose some sort of rationality on their dating, but I believe that is exactly the wrong response. If anything, all of this information should teach us to trust our intuition more and our conscious mind less. And we should also remember that the tricks our minds play on us are not necessarily a bad thing for our love lives. For example, being in a relationship appears to lessen how attractive we find other people. In one study, male students in a relationship judged unknown women 10 percent less attractive than single men did. Being in a relationship also causes us to exaggerate our partner’s good qualities. In another study, 95 percent of people claimed that their partner was above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor.
     
    Regardless, the vagaries of our minds when it comes to everything from predicting how something will make us feel in the future to remembering how something made us feel in the past should generate a certain amount of skepticism for one of the central claims of the romantic story line—that finding Mr. or Ms. Right will solve all of our problems and make us happy. If you don’t believe me, then you need to consider what I like to call the parable of the lottery winner and paraplegic, which reveals that no single thing affects our happiness as much as we think it will. There are numerous studies confirming this, ranging from college students predicting how they would feel if their football team lost to professors predicting how unhappy they would be if they failed to get tenure. But let’s go right to the starkest evidence imaginable. I’m going to ask you a simple question: would it bring you more happiness to win the lottery or to become a paraplegic? No doubt, this is an astoundingly easy choice. Equally astounding, though, is how little the difference is between these choices when you measure people’s long-term happiness.
     
    At the moment people first learn their fates, of course, the contrast could not be greater. Lottery winners are ecstatic and often think that all of their problems have been solved, while paraplegics face a level of despair that is difficult for most of us to imagine. But over time, even the best and the worst of events get woven into the fabric of our daily lives. According to more than one study, lottery winners are no happier than people in general. One study compared people who had won anywhere from $50,000 to $1 million in a state lottery with a group of nonwinners. Not only were the winners no happier than the nonwinners, researchers found that many everyday activities, such as watching television or talking with a friend, were no longer as enjoyable for the winners as they were for the nonwinners. What about the paraplegics? Surely, they were significantly unhappier than the average person. But another study revealed that their level of happiness was only slightly lower than it had been before their loss.
     
    No matter how important something is at the moment, we always tend to overestimate how long it will stay with us. Psychologists call this the “durability bias.” This holds true even for our relationships. A recent study has shown that people were less upset by breakups than they had