At the time of establishing Couple relationshipsmany factors influence, but something essential also comes into play when we establish friendship relationships: the personality attraction of the other. And this, according to a team of scientists from the boston universityIt is something that we may be doing wrong.
The authors of new research have found that we usually suffice with a factor in common or disagreement to know if we want to have a relationship with that person. This is based on something known as self-essentialist reasoning and, it seems, it could be leading us to miss out on meeting a lot of interesting people.
Said reasoning establishes that people consider that we have a deep core, or essence, that shapes who we are. In other words, we believe that all our opinions or preferences go in a pack, so that if someone has one, they probably also have the rest. It is a thought that stems from the fact that, when thinking about ourselves, we have a lot of information, but we don’t know as much about other people, so we fill in the gaps of uncertainty with our own perceptions.
The essence keeps you from a good relationship
For the realization of this study that has just been published, its authors recruited a group of people and spoke to them about the opinions of a fictional character about one of five very relevant topics: abortion, the death penalty, animal testing, euthanasia or gun possession.
Once they were given that information, they were asked about the roots of their identity. To do this, the researchers devised a survey aimed at establishing how close each person was to the self-essentialist reasoning.
As they had already predicted, those who were closest to self-essentialism tended to show more or less propensity to establish a relationship with the self. fictional character whether they agreed or disagreed with his opinion on a single topic. They didn’t need to know more. This, in part, could make sense. After all, they are issues that can even be related to human rights or those of other living beings. Opinions regarding that can be closely linked to other aspects of the way to see life of a person.
For this reason, the authors of the research repeated the experiment on something as trivial as counting the number of blue dots on a screen. It was a complicated calculation, so some overestimated and others underestimated. And again, those who were closer to self-essentialism were more likely to establish a relationship with the character who had counted roughly the same number of points.
What does this have to do with love?
This study was not conducted with reference to couple relationships. But it is true that many times romantic relationships begin simply as the attraction to establish a friendship with a person. Then the brain and hormones come into play.
The testosterone arouses sexual desire oxytocin promotes attachment to the other person and dopamine and endorphins they cause that familiar appearance of butterflies in the stomach.
For all this, when we start a relationship, there is no cherub shooting arrows of love. Our idea of human identity goes to work, and then hormones do the rest. Does all this make the situation any less romantic? It doesn’t have to. Knowing why we fall in love does not inhibit the pleasure of doing so. Of course, let’s give ourselves the opportunity to get to know people beyond their opinion on a single issue. We may be surprised if we put our hormones to work in that relationship.