As someone familiar with dieting, I’m very aware that when temptation comes my way, in the form of a cream bun or a chocolate, immediate gratification tends to win over my long-term goals. This is almost a universal psychological phenomenon. However some researchers believe that those in committed partnerships will tend to show the opposite, favouring the long term goal of a committed relationship to short term gratification, e.g. starting an affair.

While leading a research team at the University of California, Gian Gonzaga came to the conclusion that people in love are blinded to the charms of other potential partners. In a study of 60 heterosexual students, who had been in a relationship for an average of three years, they showed each subject a photo of a stranger, who they found to be attractive, and then asked the subject to write a five minute essay on what was attractive about that person, followed by another brief essay describing an ideal first meeting.

The subjects were then split into three groups and each group was asked to write a further two five-minute essays. One group had to write about the time they had felt the most love for their current partner and when they last felt such love; another group were to write about the time they felt the most sexual desire towards their current partner and the most recent time. The last group were told to write about whatever came to mind.

While writing their second essay, all the subjects were instructed not to think about the attractive person in the photo. Then, during the last essay they were encourage to do so, having been given a piece of paper to record every time their attention turned to thoughts of the person in the photo. The number of ticks made by a subject was then recorded.

When allowed to think about the attractive stranger, the “love” group marked their paper only one-third as often as the “sexual desire” group, and only one-sixth as often as the control group. Also, when prompted at the end of the experiment, the “love” group remembered significantly fewer details about what had made the person in their photo more attractive than the other two groups.

When people are instructed to not think of something, a “rebound effect” occurs, causing the taboo thought to present itself even more frequently than it otherwise would. Each groups’ repressed thoughts might have expressed equally high “rebound” during writing the final essay, but this wasn’t the case.

Gian Gonzaga said:

Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive.

You might also enjoy reading:-

• Official: 237 reasons to have sex
• Love in the Laboratory
• Beautiful women more likely to fake orgasms
• Listening: More than just keeping quiet
• Intelligence increases the odds of getting sex

Posted by Oliver in Psychology, Sociobiology

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