Professor Paul Bloom:I'm delighted to introduce the first guest lecturer for this Introduction to Psychology course, Dean Peter Salovey. Peter is an old friend and colleague. Many of you--I think everybody here knows of him through his role as Dean of Yale College. I'll just, in this context of this introduction, mention two other things about him. One is prior to being dean and in fact, still as a dean, he's an active scientist and in particular, a social psychologist actively involved in studying health psychology, the proper use of psychological methods to frame health messages, and also is the founder and developer of the idea of emotional intelligence, an idea he's done a huge amount of research on. Secondly, Peter is or was an active and extremely well-known teacher at Yale College. He taught at one point, the largest course ever in Yale College – a course on Psychology in Law which broke every record ever had here. And before that, during that, and after that, he was a legendary Introduction to Psychology teacher. And I think--and he had some reason for why he was so legendary with his lecture today on the topic of love.心理学空间s@/X]T3t6z4_j
r,[K K!_ k0[applause]
Dean Peter Salovey:Thanks very much. Okay. Thank you very much, Professor Bloom. It really is a pleasure to come and lecture to you today on Valentine's Day on the topic of love. My main area of research is human emotion. And love is an emotion. It's not one that I study personally, at least not in the lab, and--but it is fun to talk about. And it is a topic that lends itself to many social psychological phenomena. It's also great to be able to come in and guest lecture. One of the things I very much miss since serving as dean is the opportunity to teach Psychology 110. And although I love being dean, I do miss teaching Introductory Psychology, the feeling of exposing people to ideas that maybe you hadn't heard before.
S2\@)Q5dm8w0Well, I suspect some of the ideas in this talk you'll have not heard before and for a variety of reasons. A couple of the things you'll notice is that some of the experiments I'll talk about today are not the kinds of experiments that can be done anymore. They're not considered ethically acceptable but they were done in the ‘50s and ‘60s and early ‘70s when ethical standards were different and so we can teach them. We just can't give you the same experiences that some of the college students that we'll talk about today in these studies had.心理学空间*iwDtz\
The other thing I will mention is that there is a certain androcentric and heterosexual quality to much of the social psychological research on romantic love. You'll see that in the experiments. Usually, the participants are men and usually the targets are women in these experiments. I'm not endorsing this as the only way to study love. It just happens to be the way these experiments were done and so I mention this caution right from the beginning. We'll have to think about--One of the things you should think about is do you think these experiments generalized to other kinds of dyadic relationships. And that's a question that I think you can ask throughout this lecture.
+z%ALcW ?8\0Okay. So let's get started. And to start things off I think what we need to do is consider a definition. I'm going to define what love is but then most of the experiments I'm going to talk about are really focused more on attraction than love--who finds each other of romantic interest that might then develop into a love relationship. But let's start with a definition of love. And I'm going to pick a definition from a former colleague, Robert Sternberg, who is now the dean at Tufts University but was here on our faculty at Yale for nearly thirty years or so. And he has a theory of love that argues that it's made up of three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment, or what is sometimes called decision commitment. And these are relatively straightforward. He argued that you don't have love if you don't have all three of these elements.
%`ws[$}3L0Intimacy is the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of bonding. Operationally, you could think of intimacy as you share secrets, you share information with this person that you don't share with anybody else. Okay. That's really what intimacy is, the bond that comes from sharing information that isn't shared with other--with many other people. Second element is passion. Passion is what you think it is. Passion is the--we would say the drive that leads to romance. You can think of it as physical attraction or sex. And Sternberg argues that this is a required component of a love relationship. It is not, however, a required component of taking a shower in Calhoun College. [a Yale dormitory] [laughter]心理学空间t#d[tZL1X
The third element of love in Sternberg's theory is what he calls decision or commitment, the decision that one is in a love relationship, the willingness to label it as such, and a commitment to maintain that relationship at least for some period of time. Sternberg would argue it's not love if you don't call it love and if you don't have some desire to maintain the relationship. So if you have all three of these, intimacy, passion and commitment, in Sternberg's theory you have love. Now what's interesting about the theory is what do you have if you only have one out of three or two out of three? What do you have and how is it different if you have a different two out of three? These are--What's interesting about this kind of theorizing is it give--it gives rise to many different permutations that when you break them down and start to look at them carefully can be quite interesting. So what I've done is I've taken Sternberg's three elements of love, intimacy, passion and commitment, and I've listed out the different kinds of relationships one would have if you had zero, one, two or three out of the three elements.心理学空间*A2tzSk^
B4L:D}0^/c5`0Zp:k0And I'm using names or types that Sternberg uses in his theory. These are really from him. Some of these are pretty obvious. If you don't have intimacy, if you don't have passion, if you don't have commitment, you don't have love. Sternberg calls this non-love. That's the technical term. And [laughs] essentially what he's saying is the relationship you now have to the person sitting next to you, presuming that you're sitting next to a random person that you didn't know from your college, is probably non-love. If it's something else, we could talk about it at the end of the lecture or perhaps when I get to it in a moment.
Now let's start to add elements. Let's add intimacy. This is sharing secrets, a feeling of closeness, connectedness, bonding. Let's say we have that with someone but we don't have passion, that is, no sexual arousal, and no commitment to maintain the relationship. This is liking. Sternberg calls it liking. And liking is really what is happening in most typical friendships, not your closest friendship but friendships of a casual kind. You feel close, you share certain information with that person that you don't share with other--many other people, but you're not physically attracted and there's no particular commitment to maintaining this for a long period of time.心理学空间b\DP+k"w#^`U
Now, what if you're not intimate, you're not committed, but you're passionate; you feel that sexual arousal. This is what Sternberg would call infatuation. And that term probably works for you too, infatuated love, and this is love at first sight. "I don't know you, we've never shared any secrets because I don't know you, I'm not committed to defining this as anything, I'm not committed to the future. In fact, I'm not thinking about the future. I'm thinking about right now but boy, am I attracted." Right. That's infatuation and that's what Sternberg means by infatuated love.心理学空间m MZg0y m'y7Z
The third kind of one-element relationship is there's no intimacy, right, no bonding, no closeness, no secrets, no physical attraction, no sexual arousal, but by gosh, we are going to maintain this relationship, we are committed to it for all time. Sternberg calls that "empty love." Empty love is kind of interesting. It's often the final stage of long-term relationships that have gone bad. "We don't share information with each other anymore so there's no intimacy. We don't feel physically attracted to each other anymore, there's no passion, but we'd better stay together for the kids, right? Or we've got to stay together for appearance's sake or we'd better stay together because financially it would be a disaster if we don't" or all of the reasons other than intimacy and passion that people might commit to each other. That's what Sternberg calls empty love.心理学空间 F7rp{3[O:n
"rZb`I%O ]"gu0Now what's interesting is in societies where marriages are arranged this is often the first stage of a love relationship. These two people who have maybe never seen each other before, who have never shared secrets so there's no intimacy, who have never--don't know if they're physically attracted to each other or on their wedding day revealed to each other and committed legally and sometimes religiously to each other. Right? The commitment is there but at that moment nothing else might be there. What's interesting of course is that such relationships don't seem to have any greater chance of ending in divorce than people who marry for love. But there's a big confound, there's a big problem in studies of those kind of relationships. What might it be? Anybody. What might be the problem in the statement I just made that these kind of relationships are just as likely to survive as people who marry for love? Yes.
Student: [inaudible]心理学空间F~,E,RL @Bh$[$`
5X| b)o*z-_J0Dean Peter Salovey:Yeah. So they may occur; they're more likely to occur in societies that frown on divorce. They make it very costly, socially costly, to divorce, so then they stay together for all kinds of reasons, not always such good ones.心理学空间a2U.b*Y'^0e
All right. Now who was it who sang the song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"? Was that Meat Loaf? Who was it? It was Meat Loaf. All right. Professor Bloom says it was Meat Loaf. It was Meat Loaf. You're all saying, "there was a singer called Meat Loaf?" Meat Loaf sang the song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad." Let's see if two out of three ain't bad. What if you have intimacy, "we share secrets, passion, we feel physically attracted to each other but we're not making any commitments here." Sternberg calls that "romantic love." This is physical attraction with close bonding but no commitment, Romeo and Juliet when they first met. This is often the way relationships start: "We like each other, I'm physically attracted to each other, I--to you, I enjoy spending time with you but I'm not making any long-term commitments. So I'm not even willing to use the ‘L' word in describing what it is we have." Right? Many of you might have been in relationships of this sort. That's romance. That's romantic love.
/\4a/l,rik6AL-m0Now, what if you have intimacy, "we share secrets with each other, but there's no particular physical attraction but we are really committed to this relationship." This is what Sternberg calls "companionate love." This is your best friend. "We are committed to sharing intimacy, to being friends forever," but physical attraction is not part of the equation here. This is sort of the--maybe the Greek ideal in relationships of some kind.
All right. What if we have passion, "I'm sexually attracted to you," but no intimacy. "I don't want to really know that much about you, I don't want to really share anything of me with you, but I am committed to maintaining this physical attraction to you" [laughter] Well, that's what Sternberg calls "fatuous love." It's a whirlwind courtship. It's a Hollywood romance. It might lead to a shotgun wedding. Maybe you find yourself in Las Vegas and you get married for a day and a half and then realize that this wasn't such a good idea. And maybe your name is Britney and you're a singer. [laughter]心理学空间anvBR_ T]a%|@
#Pj)H#M%lj*C0Well, anyway, you've got the idea. That's fatuous love. "We are basically committed to each other for sex" but it's very hard to make those relationships last a long time because we might not have anything in common, we might not share anything with each other, we might not trust each other, we are not particularly bonded to each other. On the other hand, if you have all three, intimacy, passion, commitment, this is "consummate love" according to Sternberg – complete love. This is how he defines love.
V%zd8IZO m8u0Okay. So now you have a definition of love and you can now, as a homework assignment, sit down tonight and make a list of every person you know by the three elements of love and just start putting the check marks in the boxes and tallying up your personal love box score. And we don't want to collect those. We don't even want to see those but you can have fun with that. Then you can ask the other people to do it too and you can compare with each other. [laughter] And if you all survive this exercise you'll be better for it. [laughter] What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's the idea behind that exercise.
]Y'Y:y6w0All right. Now the social psychology of love really has been a social psychology of attraction. What makes people find each other attractive? What makes them want to be intimate? What makes them physically desirable to each other? What might lead to a commitment, a decision to make a commitment to make the relationship last? This is just so nice. I'm giving this lecture on love and the two of you are holding hands here in the front row. It's really-- [laughter] And-- [applause] All three elements present, intimacy, passion, and-- [laughter] Yeah. Okay. [laughter] Good. Just checking. [laughter] Okay.心理学空间l7X/~P8B,]2@/~
So what's interesting about the social psychology of attraction is it has focused on seven variables. And I've divided these into two groups, the big three and the more interesting four. And I call them the big--The big three are three variables that the effects are so powerful that they almost don't need to be discussed in much detail. The more interesting four are the ones I'm going to focus on in this lecture because they're a bit more subtle and they may be things that you've never heard of before. But let's quickly talk about the big three.心理学空间MEt d#\(ka
The way to understand the big three is with the phrase "all other things being equal." All other things being equal, people who find themselves in close spatial proximity to each other, like sharing an armrest in a lecture, will be more likely to be attracted to each other and form a romantic relationship. Okay, all other things being equal. Now this has been tested in lots of interesting ways. Studies have been done in the city of New York where you can--if you live in Manhattan you can actually get a very nice metric of how far apart people live from each other in city blocks. Right? You have a nice grid pattern and you can use a city block metric to add up the number of blocks between people's doors. And people who live more closely together are more likely to end up in romantic relationships with each other. It seems kind of obvious. Right? This even works on college campuses. We can measure in feet the distance between the door to your room and the door to every other room of a student on campus and there will be a correlation between the likelihood of--it's a negative correlation--the likelihood of getting into a romantic relationship with a person and the number of feet between your door and that person's door. The fewer feet, the more likely a romantic relationship, all other things being equal.心理学空间5E(O^o4ec%]
\ ^_/qAC y U0Now, all other things being equal is a big qualifier. Right? But if we could statistically control for every other variable, all I'd need to do is measure the distance from your door to everybody else's door on campus and I could chart out who's going to fall in love with whom on the Yale campus. Now, this idea in a way is--I don't know. Maybe it's a little counterintuitive. There is a kind of cultural myth around the stranger, the person you don't know, who you will--who you fall in love with. And that is not likely to be the case if it's the person who is nearby. Right? And you'll see as we go through the other big--the other two "big three" that there is a kind of repetition of this theme. It isn't the stranger you fall in love with.心理学空间(RS(x4__S
All right. Let's continue down. Similarity. You've probably heard the phrase "Birds of a feather flock together" and that's true when it comes to romance. On any dimension that psychologists have measured in these kinds of studies, when people are more similar they are more likely to find each other attractive. This could be obvious things like height or age but it also could be things like attitudes toward capital punishment, preference for the Red Sox over the Yankees. Right? All of these are dimensions of similarity. All things being equal, the more similar the more likely you'll find each other attractive. So, opposites don't really attract. Birds of a feather may flock together but opposites don't really attract each other.心理学空间D-zRJ&W?7f.H6L9v-v
'Q]D,p7a0Now, usually at this point somebody in the lecture hall raises their hand and says, "Well, my boyfriend or my girlfriend and I are complete opposites and how do you account for that, Professor Salovey?" And I usually look at them and I say, "Good luck." [laughter]心理学空间kDoUWj)CW {
wiq1KOW0And of course all things might not be equal. There may be other variables at play but, all things being equal, similarity does not breed contempt. Similarity breeds attraction. Okay? Isn't it interesting? We have all of these common sayings that contradict each other and then empirically, some of them turn out to have more evidence supporting them than others. So "opposites attract?" Not much evidence. "Similarity breeds contempt?" Not much evidence. "Birds of a feather flock together?" Yeah, there's some evidence for that anyway.
Finally, familiarity. Familiarity--We tend to fall in love with people in our environment with whom we are already familiar. The idea that some enchanted evening we will see a stranger--Where are The New Blue [a Yale a cappella group that sings for couples on Valentine's Day] when you need them? [laughter] "Some enchanted evening you will see a stranger across a crowded room." Right? What musical is that from? "South Pacific." Very good. You will see a stranger across a crowded room. That's kind of a cultural myth. Of course it happens, but much more common is somebody you already know, somebody you have seen repetitively you suddenly find attraction--attractive and a relationship forms. Okay?心理学空间hoW'pQbX
So the big three: People who are similar to you, people who are already familiar to you, people who are nearby in space. These are the people, all things being equal, that you will find attractive. Okay? So those are the big three. Those are big main effects. Those are big, easy to observe in various ways in the lab. By the way, the familiarity idea doesn't just work for people. I can show you words in a language that you don't speak and I can flash those words to you very quickly and I can later repeat some of those words and mix in some new ones that you've never seen before and I can say, "I don't know--I know you don't know what any of these words mean. I know you can't read these characters but just, if you had to tell me, which ones do you like and which ones don't you like or how much do you like each one?" The ones you will like are the ones you saw earlier, the ones that you already have familiarity. Even if you don't remember having seen them, even if that familiarity was generated with such quick exposures that you don't remember even having seen anything, you will get that familiarity effect. Okay? Good.心理学空间Q5_R7RFj.C,i
The more interesting four. These are more interesting because they're a little bit complicated, a little bit subtle. Let's start with actually the one that is my favorite. This is "competence." Think about other people in your environment. Think about people who are competent. Generally--And think about people who are incompetent. Generally, we are more attracted to people who seem competent to us. Now, that isn't very interesting. And it turns out that's not really the effect. Yes, we're more attracted to people who are competent than people who we think are incompetent but people who are super competent, people who seem competent on all dimensions, they're kind of threatening to us. They don't make us feel so good about ourselves. Right? They make us feel a bit diminished by comparison. So, what we really like--The kind of person we're really attracted to is the competent individual who occasionally blunders. And this is called the Pratfall Effect, that our liking for the competent person grows when they make a mistake, when they do something embarrassing, when they have a failure experience. Okay?