7 Strange-But-True Psychology Facts That Explain Why We're Irresistibly Attracted To Certain People
The secret laws of attraction most of us don't even realize we follow.
Emilia Rahmatullina | Unsplash Love and attraction are arguably the most confusing of all human emotions. Poets write about them, philosophers ponder them, and virtually all humans actively seek them. Self-help guides and magazines are filled with tips, tricks, and suggestions to help you find the right mate, but the advice about the secret law of attraction can be conflicting.
Love and attraction have been studied extensively by science, and what has been unearthed might surprise you. We might not know exactly why these things happen, but no doubt at some point in our evolutionary history, they served our ancestors well.
7 Strange-but-true psychology facts that explain why we're irresistibly attracted to certain people:
1. Men are more patient than women
Although popular culture tends to cast women as the gender more likely to sit by the phone, this isn’t actually the case. According to research, women wait just seven days to hear back from a date before giving up.
Men are willing to wait an average of 11.25 days. Men are also 80 percent more likely than women to go on a date with someone with whom they do not yet feel chemistry.
2. You literally sound different when you're into someone
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Studies show that both men and women change their voices when speaking with someone they perceive as attractive. Interestingly, for both genders, the vocal tone actually drops down. Independent raters consistently rate the lower tone as more attractive when compared with the speakers’ normal voices.
3. Casual hookups aren't just a modern thing — our brains are wired for it
It turns out that your grandparents’ generation wasn’t as innocent as they led everyone to believe. Humans seem to be biologically hardwired for premarital intimacy.
Surveys show that even among women born in the 1940s, supposedly a much more chaste era, more than 9 out of 10 had been intimate before getting married. When taking all generations from the 1940s through today into account, 95 percent of people had been intimate before marriage at least once.
4. Hot people hijack your brain
First impressions do matter, and attractiveness counts for a lot, according to scientific research. When subjects were asked to attend to a cognitively demanding task while ignoring irrelevant faces that popped up periodically, attractive faces were far more distracting than unattractive ones. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but once you see it, putting it out of your mind can be challenging.
5. Women are attracted to men with dogs
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Guys have long claimed that taking a dog to the park is a great way to meet women. It turns out that is actually true! Across multiple studies, researchers found that a man with a dog in tow was a stunning three times more likely to get a woman’s phone number.
6. Red is a cheat code to getting a man's undivided attention
Women: If you want to up your odds of being noticed without drawing too much attention, opt to wear something red. For reasons that are not yet clear, studies consistently show that when the same woman wears red versus a different color, men are more inclined to engage her in deeper conversations. This is true even when the clothing styles are otherwise identical.
7. Status still matters — especially to women
Sorry, men. Despite protests to the contrary, science shows that wealth and prestige affect women far differently than men. When the same woman is seated in a high-status car rather than an average one, men tend to rate her as equally attractive.
When a man is seated in a high-status car, however, women consistently rate him as more attractive. Maybe this is an evolutionary holdover from the days when men were providers?
Love and attraction are complex and, at times, frankly, bizarre. It can be difficult to navigate the waters of early dating, so why not take every benefit you can? Walking a dog or wearing a red shirt is no guarantee of love, but it can’t hurt, either.
Neuroscientist Lucy L. Brown, Ph. D., and the late biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., are the writing team behind the Anatomy of Love. Their work focuses on matters of the brain and romantic love.
