Looking for Love?
Jessie WhitfieldIssue date: 7/3/08 Section: Sex
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"I think it's hard to meet people for many reasons. Out of my personal experience, I have found that there is nowhere to meet people," Giroux says. "I went to school for early childhood education. This is not a subject many men choose to study, but if they do, they're often married. I'm also not the type of person who wants to find some lush in a bar. So what's a girl to do? That leaves me with friends of friends. This might not seem so bad, but when you grow up in Tempe and then go to ASU, you tend to see the same crowd. Nothing seems to be new and there is no initial rush of excitement to meet and get to know a new person."
Perhaps Giroux, like many others, is simply looking for love in all the wrong places, but place has nothing to do with it. In fact, school, work, parties and bars provide ample opportunity to meet people. Instead, it's looking that is the problem according to a study about "value heuristic" by an international team of psychologists from INSEAD, the international business school with campuses in France and Singapore.
In their study, the researchers selected a group of young people to view close to 100 pictures, half of birds and half of flowers, in random order and informed the participants that they would be paid a few cents either for a bird picture or a flower picture they saw. To determine whether a participant would be paid for either seeing a bird picture or flower picture they allowed the participants to flip a coin then, before paying them accordingly, asked them to estimate the total number of bird picture and total number of flower pictures they had seen.
Results, which were published in the January issue of Psychological Science, revealed that participants who were paid for spotting flower pictures thought there were fewer flowers than birds and participants who were paid for spotting bird pictures thought there were fewer birds than flowers. None of the participants knew there were an equal amount of both.
The experiment confirmed the researchers' theory that there is a deep-wired link between scarcity and value in the human brain that humans use on a day-to-day basis when making life decisions, and those that yearn for something wrongly perceive scarcity, such as the case with love.
Mesa Community College graduate, Nikki Lebrun, says, "It's hard to meet someone worth dating … that is if you're looking for the perfect person. You're not going to find your next boyfriend if you're looking. You have to put yourself out there and it's going to happen (meeting someone worth dating) when you least expect it."
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