What does an amusement park, a scary movie, and a rock climbing wall have in common? Well, they all get your heart pumping. They all give you a rush of excitement at some point or another.
And they make really great first dates. And these three commonalities aren't unrelated. Part of the reason that these three date ideas are so successful is that they get you and your date's heart pounding. In fact, sometimes some people sweat out of suspense of fear, and by the end of the date, you might find yourself looking at the other person with butterflies in your stomach. But these butterflies aren't always the result of your attraction to the other person.
Even if you might still tell yourself that you had a hot date. This is called the misattribution of arousal, and it's pretty fascinating. It's one of the many ways that our brains might get its wires crossed and make a mistake about how we're feeling.
So first off, what is misattribution? There are actually a ton of different ways that our brains misattribute information. So misattribute simply means to make a mistake. Social psychologists have studied a handful of different misattributions and that distort the way that we see the world or remember things. The misattribution of arousal is particularly interesting because it involves completely arbitrary activities, like running or watching a scary movie, to how attractive someone else may seem to us.
So in the misattribution of arousal, arousal doesn't always mean sexual arousal. To arouse simply means to awaken or set off a certain feeling. It could refer to the arousal of our fight or flight response, or to awaken someone from sleep.
So think about your body's response when you're in love, when you're feeling in love, or about when you go on an exciting first date. Your heart is racing, your palms get really sweaty, and you probably feel a little bit anxious. Now, think about your body's response to a suspenseful movie, or when you're starting to inch up the top of the roller coaster.
They're the same reactions, right? See, us as humans, we are meaning-making creatures. Our brains, they want an explanation for the way that we feel. And on a date, we may mistake our sweaty palms and racing heart for sexual arousal, when really, we're just nervous about rock climbing or seeing a horror movie.
As I continue, I want to tell you something about this bridge experiment. In 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aaron put this theory to the test. They created an experiment in which male participants walked across two bridges.
One bridge was sturdy and low to the ground. The other was suspended high in the air, so it was less sturdy and was supposed to evoke a fear response. The researchers hypothesized that the participants may misattribute their arousal from the scary bridge and think that they were more attracted to a woman that they met during the study.
So they recruited the woman to meet the participants at two different parts of the test. The first meeting was in the middle of the bridge. The woman gave the men a thematic apperception test in which they basically showed them a picture and had the men tell them a story about it.
The image was not meant to invoke sexual themes in the story. It was just an everyday image. Now the men who were on the suspension bridge high up in the air were much more likely to bring in sexual themes to the story than the men who were not on the suspension bridge. But the experiment wasn't over. The woman also met the men at the end of the bridge or maybe just a small distance away from the bridge.
The idea here is that it was at a point where the men would have calmed down from the excitement of the suspension bridge. And it's also important to note here that the woman did not know the hypothesis behind the experiment. So she was instructed to give each of the men her phone number and tell them that if they had any questions, they should call her.
I think you can see where this is going. The same experiment was done with a male at the end of a bridge, and there was no difference in whether the, presumably straight, participants called the male after the experiment was over. But there was a difference when the researchers recruited a woman for the experiment.
The men who met the woman immediately after leaving the suspension bridge were much more likely to call the woman than the man. This proved the researcher's hypothesis. And there's a few other experiments. But you should know it also goes both ways. A few other experiments aimed to replicate the findings of the bridge experiments in 1974. And one in particular expanded on the idea of how misattribution affects attraction.
In 1981, researchers published, Passionate Love and the Misattribution of Arousal. It's quite a study name. Anyways, the publication involved two different experiments in which men were asked to watch a video of a woman talking about themselves, and then rate the attractiveness of that woman. The videos were filmed in a way to make the woman appear more or less attractive.
Some men were put through exercise tests before the video in an attempt to create a state of arousal. The researchers found that the aroused men weren't just more likely to rate the attractive woman as attractive than the control group, they were also more likely to rate the unattractive women as less attractive. There have also been studies on misattribution of arousal in women, too. One study in particular shows that different types of arousal may affect men and women. For example, in 2017, researchers published Misattribution of Musical Arousal Increases Sexual Attraction Towards Opposite-Sex Faces in Females.
And their findings were pretty much self-explanatory. When women were aroused by listening to music, they were more likely to rate neutral male faces as attractive than the women who rated the faces in silence. So what does this mean for you and your dates?
Because throughout this video you might have been thinking, I know what I'm gonna do for my next date, something scary. But the real lesson from this video should be the importance of knowing yourself and your body. You may think that the butterflies you had in your stomach are from the girl that you went on a date with, or maybe even the food that you see in front of you. But that attractiveness may just be due to other feelings in your body. What about the rest of your environment?
The more you can become more self-aware of what is happening in your body, the less likely you will misattribute arousal and attraction. I hope you guys really enjoyed this video on the misattribution of arousal, and if you have any questions at all, feel free to leave a comment below. And if you're interested, I actually have a whole social psychology series that I think you would find very interesting.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one!