Animal magnetism may be a more literal concept than it’s given credit for, according to a new study that finds that people are more attracted to their romantic partners after playing with magnets.
The research is an example of a social priming effect, an old idea in psychology that has recently become more controversial. The idea holds that when people are “primed” or prompted to think about a particular concept — such as physical magnetic attraction — it affects their cognition in surprising ways. In this case, the magnets may make the metaphor of love as a physical force more prominent in people’s minds, leading them to report closer feelings with their partners, said Andrew Christy, a graduate student in psychology at Texas A&M University and a co-author of the new study.
Love and magnets
In the new research, Christy and his colleagues attempted to guard against a false result by conducting their experiments twice, replicating their own research. In the new study, researchers focused on the metaphor of love as a physical force. They asked 120 students who were 18 to 22 years old and who were either in relationships or had been in relationships, to fill out questionnaires about their connection with their partners. Before they began, the students were told to take a “mental break” by playing with blocks, putting them together and taking them apart. Some of the students were given magnetised blocks that attracted each other, while some had magnetised blocks that repelled each other, and some had blocks without magnets. The participants who played with the magnetically attracting blocks reported greater attraction, satisfaction and commitment in their relationships compared with those students given the other two block types, Christy told Live Science. So in their next experiment, this one with 1
50 students, the researchers included only blocks with magnets that attracted, and non-magnetised blocks. The people who played with the magnetised blocks again reported greater levels of satisfaction in their relationships than those who played with non-magnetised ones, the researchers said in their article, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
No one has previously studied the “love is attraction” metaphor, Christy said, though, in a similar vein, a previous study did find that people report that candy and water taste sweeter after they are primed with thoughts of love. “These studies reiterate the basic point of conceptual metaphor theory, that these metaphors that we use in language aren’t just figures of speech or ways of talking about things. They actually are reflective of how we think about things, too,” Christy said.
Source: www.livescience.com
