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Love at first sight? It’s first-class nonsense!

When you hear someone say they fell in love with a person the moment they laid eyes on them…. smile and tell them it’s bull. They are bound to beat you. So quickly add: ‘No, not me, experimental psychologists say so’!

Richard Moreland was a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He wanted to study the development of affinity among students and chose his own class to conduct an experiment.

There were 130 students in his course. The classroom itself was deliberately chosen. It was held in a large, fan-shaped lecture hall with stadium seating.

Four women of similar appearance were chosen by Moreland to pose as students. None of them were ravishingly beautiful or even particularly distinctive. They were typical college students, whom you and me would have had the fortune or misfortune of sitting next to, in our classes.

To check if all the four faces were fairly similarly received, their photos were shown to students who were not in the class and all of them found the girls equally attractive. Put simply, the four girls looked fairly similar.

The girls never interacted with anyone in class. They arrived just before the lectures began, walked to the front of the room and sat at the front. That way, they could be seen by everyone in class.

They did not interact with any of the other students. When the lectures ended, they left the room with everyone else.

The only difference was the number of classes attended by each of the four girls. While three girls attended the classes, the fourth one didn’t attend a single class. The first girl attended 5 classes, the second one 10 and the third attended 15.

At the end of the term, students of the class were shown the photos of the four girls and were asked how attractive they found them. They were also asked if they would enjoy spending time with them and if they would like to become friends with them. Note, these are the beginnings of that goddamn thing called love!

People generally have eclectic tastes, alright, but in spite of the idiosyncratic opinions we have of different faces, there was a distinct pattern evident in the students’ answers. Women who had come to class more often were seen as more attractive!

The woman who had come to 15 classes was seen as more attractive than the woman who had come to 10 who was seen as more attractive than the woman who had come to 5. Seeing someone more frequently made people like them more!

Moral of the story: The more you see, the more you like. Now you know why we prefer some brands more than we do others. Especially the ones we see often…in ads, on shop shelves and being used by others!

They say familiarity breeds contempt. I don’t know about that. But after having read Moreland’s research, I can tell you one thing. Familiarity breeds!

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May I hav ur attention. For 47 seconds plz!

One of mankind’s many infamous achievements is our growing inability to focus on anything in particular for more than a few minutes. More so online!

Dr. Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at University of California, who studies how digital media impacts our lives has been tracking, for decades, the decline of our ability to focus. Glad she didn’t lose focus on her research half way through!

She says our average attention on a screen was 2½ minutes in 2004. A few years later, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Today, at best, we pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.

If you think this is scary, here is a finding that torpedoes whatever productivity that can be expected from us mankind. ‘When attention is diverted from an active work project, it also takes about 25 minutes to refocus on that task’ she says!

Wonder how?

‘If we look at work in terms of switching projects, as opposed to the micro view of switching screens, we find people spend about 10½ minutes in any work project before being interrupted, internally or by someone else, and then switch to another work project,’ Mark says.

But don’t we go back to our original work, after flirting with other things?

Oh yes, we do. When we are interrupted on work two, we switch yet again to a different task. Call it work three!

And if you think this is bad, wait. Her research has shown we are also interrupted on work three, and move on to work four!

We are incorrigible flirts. With opposite sex, we always knew. But with work too, as is now proved by research. 

And then there is a ‘switch cost’ too, says Gloria. A switch cost is the time it takes one to reorient back to their original work. You were distracted. You may have lost your thought. You need to think hard to figure out what you were thinking. This leads to increased stress and resultant inefficiency. All coz you flirted with other work!

If you think you are a multi-tasker and can breeze through multiple jobs at the same time, may I puncture your bubble. Enough researches and researchers have proved there is no such thing as multitasking. You cannot do two effortful things at the same time. Yes, you can talk and walk at the same time. But you can’t sing and run. Try and be prepared to be laughed at!

Dr. Gloria Mark says one can’t read email and be in a video meeting at the same time. When you focus on one, you lose the other. “You’re actually switching your attention quickly between the two. And when you switch your attention fast, it’s correlated with stress,’ she says.

Not to put too fine a point on the subject, the more people multitask, the more errors they make!

And who or what is the biggest culprit that causes it all?

Gloria blames the email. ‘Email is probably the worst because it’s become a symbol of work,’ she says. Her research has found a direct correlation between email and higher stress.

‘In an experiment, we cut off email for some workers for one week. Using heart rate monitors, we found that they became significantly less stressed and were able to focus significantly longer.’

Can you live without emails? For a week?

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