The Matching Hypothesis Strikes Again
What happens when people “marry outside their looks” (that is, when you marry someone who is obviously much more attractive than you are)? There’s an interesting and humorous article on page 86 of the May 7, 2007 issue of Time magazine that discusses just this. The title is “The Last Taboo”. Or, as the author puts it, “Marrying a few degrees up or down the hotness scale.” Recall that part of episode 4 (”On Birds Flocking and Opposites Attracting”) is about what psychologists often refer to as the matching hypothesis - the observation that we all seem to have a sense of how attractive we are and how attractive other people are and we tend to marry people who we deem to be at about our same “level”.
Here are a couple other examples of seeming mismatches:
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They’re now divorced but Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett
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Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
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Dennis Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth Jane (Harper) Kucinich
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Continue reading this entry»Episode #4: On Birds Flocking and Opposites Attracting: the data on Love
Do Birds of a Feather Flock together or do Opposites Attract? That’s the question we examine this week on the first video episode of The Psych Files.
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I got a little ambitious and decided to do a video podcast. One of my favorite topics (I suppose many people’s favorite topics) has to do with how romantic relationships begin and why some relationships flourish while others don’t. Well, this is a topic that psychologists have studied in great depth and some time back I had one of my classes conduct a survey on the topic. So this video podcast has 3 parts: 1) a little background on 3 theories which relate to how relationships begin, 2) a quick overview of the survey my class and I created, and 3) a look at the results using a very neat new program called InspireData (from the Inspiration concept mapping people). I really had fun putting the video podcast together and I hope you find it informative. If you’ve got a moment let me know what you think.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
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