Attraction studied at FSU

A recent study shows how quickly and strongly people are attracted to others.

The paper, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You: Attentional Adhesion to Mates and Rivals,”  was written by an assistant psychology professor at Florida State University, Jon Maner.

Maner found that “all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half of a second of seeing them,” according to physorg.com.  “Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course, but those in committed relationships also checked people out, with one major difference: They were more interested in beautiful people of the same sex.”

The attraction to the opposite sex was prominent in single participants, while the coupled participants were attracted to the same sex because they found that the same sex may potentially be a competitor, according to physorg.com.

Here is what the experiment consisted of:

In the experiments, study participants — 120 people in the first study and 160 and 162 in the second and third studies, respectively — completed questionnaires to determine the extent to which they were motivated to seek out members of the opposite sex. They then took part in a series of “priming” activities before they were shown photos of highly attractive men, highly attractive women, average-looking men and average-looking women.

After a photo of one of the faces flashed in one quadrant of a computer screen, the participants were required to shift their attention away from that face to somewhere else on the screen. Using a precise measure of reaction time, Maner found that it took the participants longer to shift their attention away from the photos of the highly attractive people.

~ by Kim on September 25, 2007.