by Jesse James
Part III:
The Psychology of Seduction
One of William Shakespeare’s early comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to eschew the company of women for three years of fasting and study. Their noble plan soon collapses as they become infatuated with beautiful Princess Aquitaine and her luscious lady friends.
Men who have endured years of failure with the opposite sex often attempt to foreswear the dating scene entirely, effectively giving up. Like King Navarre and his friends, they often find such a drastic choice impossible; man’s biological nature leads him to pursue women, successfully or not. Other men decide to settle down with the least undesirable woman they can find, resulting in failed marriages, depression and regrets.
I want to help you avoid a life filled with celibacy, misery and disappointment. In this final section of the book, we will delve deeper into the psychology of seduction, exploring how men can rapidly and effectively build attraction with the opposite sex. Using psychological techniques borrowed from evolutionary psychology, social psychology and marketing, you will learn how to detonate desire in the opposite sex.
Chapter 11
Love’s Labour’s Found
‘You don’t need analyzing
It is not so surprising
That you feel very strange but nice
Your heart goes pitter patter
I know just what’s the matter
Because I’ve been there once or twice
Put your head on my shoulder
You need someone who’s older
A rubdown with a velvet glove
There is nothing you can take
To relieve that pleasant ache
You’re not sick
You’re just in love.
- Irving Berlin, ‘I Wonder Why’
Familiarity Breeds Attraction – or Contempt?
I love classic rock. At an Eagles concert several months ago, I wasn’t too impressed with their newest songs. But when they started playing their old classic ‘Take It Easy’ the crowd (myself included) went nuts. When it comes to music, it seems like the ‘old stuff’ is always better than the ‘new stuff.’ Why is that?
According to what psychologists call the ‘mere exposure effect,’ people tend to prefer the familiar over the unfamiliar. This makes good evolutionary sense. During ancestral times, familiar people, places or things which did not result in death were safer than the novel, unexpected or unknown. Old songs are familiar and comforting, while new songs are unexpected and a little unnerving.
Ad agency executives get plenty of mileage out of the ‘mere exposure effect.’ They know that most people tune out when an ad starts playing on the radio or on television. We get up to grab a snack from the fridge, chat with our friend sitting next to us, or take a mental ‘time-out’ when an ad for Campbell’s Soup pops up. We just don’t care. Problem is, on some level we do listen, and we hear the brand name. Over and over again, the brand name beats down the door to our subconscious. When it comes time to go shopping, the brand names with which we are already familiar win out over novel, unfamiliar brands. It doesn’t really matter if we pay attention to an ad; all that matters is how often we hear the brand name being advertised.
Experiments have repeatedly shown that people prefer the familiar. For example, one study showed that people prefer Chinese characters they have seen over those they have not. Incumbents always enjoy an advantage in elections. A politician with a familiar name – like Kennedy – is much more likely to win an election than a politician with a random name. Brand names appeal to us more than unfamiliar brands. And we generally prefer people we know over people we do not know.
The more we see someone, the more attractive he or she becomes. Known as the ‘mere exposure’ effect, psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated in the 1960s that simply exposing subjects to a familiar stimulus – words, faces, whatever – caused them to like that stimulus more than others which had not been presented. In one experiment, Zajonc tested the ‘mere exposure’ effect by playing musical tones of two different frequencies to chicken eggs. That’s right – he serenaded the eggs! When the chicks hatched, they showed a preference for the pre-natal tune.187
In another experiment, Charles Goetzinger of Oregon State University tested the ‘mere exposure’ effect on his students. He allowed a student to come to class dressed only in a black bag with just his feet poking out. The student sat in the back of the class, encapsulated in the black bag. Confronted with this strange intrusion, other students reacted predictably – they bullied, teased, and generally resented the intruding ‘black bag’ student, who became an immediate pariah. Then something strange happened. Over time, the students’ hostility morphed into curiosity, followed by toleration and eventually friendship. Confirming Zajonc’s ‘mere exposure’ hypothesis, simply exposing the class to the black bag day-after-day was sufficient to transform hatred into affinity.188
Zajonc was on a roll. Another one of his studies showed subjects a rotation of photos of twelve different people. Certain people appeared only once, while others appeared two, five, ten or twenty five times. The psychologist found that subjects in his study liked the faces shown multiple times more than the faces shown only once. Zajonc reports that ‘mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it.’189
Advertisers use the ‘mere exposure’ effect to build brand familiarity. A carbonated sugar drink is a carbonated sugar drink, but people prefer Coca Cola to Mountain Dew because of the constant barrage of pro-Coke advertising on TV, radio, and in magazines. Big corporations know that ‘repetition works, stupid!’ They spend billions of dollars parading their brands in front of your eyes.
The ‘mere exposure effect’ is a kind of ‘recognition bias.’ Psychologists figured out that the more familiar you are with something, the more you like it. In a famous peanut-butter taste-test experiment conducted in 1990 by Hoyer and Brown, participants chose between three jars of peanut butter. In a blind pretest, when subjects were not told the brand name, they overwhelmingly chose one brand as higher-quality and better-tasting. For the main trial, researchers recruited another group of participants and asked them to taste-test the peanut-butter with brand labels. One was nationally-recognized and heavily advertised, while the other two were fictional brands. The experimenters put the highly-rated peanut butter from the blind trial into one of the no-name brand jars, asking participants to taste-test all three brands. Can you guess the results? 73% of subjects reported the recognizable brand name peanut butter tasted better than the two no-name competitors, despite the fact that the low-quality peanut butter had been substituted in the jar. People weren’t relying on their taste buds to rate the peanut butter quality. Rather, they were relying on their familiarity with brand names.
Women respond to strange stimuli with mild discomfort and anxiety. Exposure reduces this stress response. Psychologists discovered that a series of brief (no more than 35 second) face-to-face contacts without even talking to a person increased positive responses. In other words, we like people we see often more than those we see infrequently.
Familiarity creates liking because we often respond to strange or novel phenomena or people with discomfort and anxiety. Repeated exposure decreases our feelings of anxiety as we become more comfortable.
Forget the old adage ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ According to science, the opposite holds true. The relevance of all this research for seduction is obvious; the more a woman sees you, the more she will like you, and the more attractive you will become. Stoke the fires of attraction by increasing the time you spend in the presence of your subject. If the local Starbucks barista interests you, increase the frequency of your coffeeshop visits. If the sexy librarian appeals to you, pitch a tent between the isles of books (I jest). Take note, however, that ‘mere exposure’ is not the same as seduction. In addition to frequency of exposure
, you must actively communicate your attraction. Women quickly lose respect for an obviously smitten man who is too cowardly to make a bold approach. Make your attraction known. Failure to approach a woman you see regularly can turn from ‘mere exposure’ into ‘merely friends’ or even ‘merely creepy.’
Caveat emptor. Spend too much time with someone and you will never live up to their image of you. As a general rule, use exposure to breed familiarity and attraction early in a seduction, gradually reducing your exposure to create scarcity. Understanding the proper balance between exposure and scarcity separates the master from the novice.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s Seduction Secret
Imagine you just played a round of golf and hit almost every ball into the water. You visit your doctor, complaining of uncertain and blurry vision. The doctor runs a few tests, returning with some disturbing news: ‘Sorry, but your eyes are failing. You’ll be completely blind in seven days.’ Would you develop a new appreciation for eyesight that you never had before?
We want what we can’t have. We value that which is scarce. In economic terms, scarcity increases value, assuming the production of the scarce resource cannot be increased. You are – by definition – a scarce resource. No factory on earth can churn out another you.
Make yourself scarce and women will desire you. Make yourself too scarce and women will forget you. In the marketing world we learn that people view a resource as more desirable when it has recently become less available than when it was scarce all along.
We can learn a lot about seduction from Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev did not seduce women; he seduced an entire nation with democratic reforms known as ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika.’ When a military coup by hard-line communists overthrow Gorbachev in 1990 and placed him under house arrest, the normally-passive Russian population rose up spontaneously against the leaders of the coup. Muscovites are no strangers to repression; the CIA and Time Magazine expected them to accept the latest abuse with dignity and grace, as they always had. But this time something had changed. Gorbachev gave them freedom while military hard-liners snatched it away, like dragging a moose carcass away from a grizzly bear.
People view a resource as more desirable when it has recently become less available than when it was scarce all along. Russian citizens knew only repression for most of the twentieth century. Freedom was a pipe dream. The population reacted like angry wolves when the military snatched away the few liberties that Gorbachev had given them.
What does the downfall of the Soviet Union have to do with seduction? Since people want something (like freedom) that has recently become unavailable than when it has always been scarce, you can increase your desirability by alternating between availability and scarcity. Sometimes you’re around; sometimes you’re not. The hand that giveth is the hand that taketh away.
TIP: Use Strategic Absence
Do not make yourself too available. Create attraction through familiarity, then withdraw. Leave for a few days or a week. Forget to respond to emails, text messages and Facebook posts. Remember: we’re not attracted to a person, but to an image we create in our mind. Remove the physical person and we fantasize about the image, which becomes stronger and more appealing during absence. Using strategic absence is like throwing a match on a woodpile, then walking away; when you come back the fire could be raging, or it could be out cold.
Closely related to the scarcity principle is what psychologists call ‘psychological reactance theory.’ This is a fancy way of saying we want what we can’t have.
Psychological reactance explains why banned or restricted items enjoy such popularity. Instead of writing great books, authors should focus on getting their books banned. In one Purdue university study, researchers showed students an advertisement for a novel. Half the students saw an advertisement that included the statement ‘a book for adults only, restricted to those 21 years and over.’ Psychologists omitted the age restriction for the other half of the students. Asked to describe their feelings toward the book, the group of students informed of the age restriction expressed greater interest in reading the book, believing they would like the book more than the other group.190
TIP: The Freeze-Out
In his best-selling book ‘The Game,’ Neil Strauss describes his use of the ‘freeze-out’ technique. When faced with a woman who is not responding to an escalation of sexual advances, Strauss recommends backing off entirely, denying the woman all attention. Pick up a book, check your email, turn on the television. Although Strauss doesn’t phrase it in psychological terms, his ‘freeze-out’ method exploits psychological reactance; we want what we can’t have. By suddenly turning off the spigot of attention and ‘going cold,’ you can can gain compliance with the desired behavior. Strauss explains that ‘She was feeling good a moment ago, enjoying your attention; now you’re taking it all away.’
The Muslim world despises Salmon Rushdie. He wrote a book called ‘Satanic Verses’ which criticizes Islam, lambasting the revered Prophet Muhammad. Not only did Muslim leaders in Arab countries ban the book, but they put a price on Rushdie’s head – literally. Jihadists have been looking for the author for years, hoping to lop off his head (Jihadists are one-trick ponies). Although I personally found ‘Satanic Verses’ rather dull, it has become a worldwide bestseller, reprinted in dozens of languages. Arab leaders magically transformed an otherwise-ordinary work into a spectacular success simply by making it illegal.
Value increases with scarcity and restrictions as long as the rare commodity has some underlying desirability. ‘Satanic Verses’ is a tedious and lackluster book, but not a horrible book; had it been simply a collection of incoherent ramblings by a mental patient, banning the work would not have made it valuable. If the government bans toothpicks, it is hard to imagine a toothpick selling for hundreds of dollars, contraband or not. In prison, cigarettes sell for quadruple the real-world price because they are banned, scarce and desirable. Who doesn’t need a smoke after a visit to the shower room?
CLINIC: Time’s Up!
Pickup artists recommend using a ‘false time constraint’ during an initial advance on a woman in order to create a sense of scarcity and alleviate her concerns about how much time the man will take up.
Developed by legendary pickup artist Neil Strauss (aka Style), the false time constraint has entered the lexicon and seduction arsenal of most pickup artists from newbie to expert. But does it really work?
Limited research in social psychology suggests that it does. Very little investigation has been done on time constraints related to attraction, but psychologists have studied the impact of time pressure on decision-making. In one study on gambling, setting a time constraint caused the subjects to think less about a gambling decision, effectively reducing their cognitive function. Time pressure is considered a barrier to decision making, forcing a subject to switch from logical processes to intuitive processes. Time pressure forces decision makers to find intuitive shortcuts rather than rationally processing all of the available data.191
Since seduction is fundamentally a manipulation game, the seducer would prefer to restrict a woman’s cognitive function, forcing her to consider his advance from an intuitive rather than logical perspective. A woman who quickly understands and dissects the bold moves of the pickup artist will seldom fall for his charm. According to the latest decision-making research, setting a time constraint obfuscates a woman’s rational thought during an interaction.
Setting a time constraint also exploits the scarcity principle by decreasing your availability. People want what they can’t have.
One of the best and most common pickup lines with embedded time pressure is the simple: ‘Hey, I only have a few minutes, but I wanted to ask you something …’
You can use a time constraint to reduce a woman’s anxiety in accepting an invitation to your apartment. For example, imagine you have a crush on the local Starbucks girl. Convincing a woman you just met at a coffeeshop to come back to your house can be tricky. Try setting
a time constraint: ‘hey I live around the block, want to try some special blueberry cheesecake I just made? I have to be somewhere in twenty minutes though, so we don’t have much time.’
Using a time constraint in this example serves two functions. First, it increases your scarcity factor, as you only make yourself available for twenty minutes. Second, it eases the pressure and anxiety of the invitation. Knowing that the interaction will be brief, casual and nonsexual reduces her anxiety about accepting your offer. Had you not set a time constraint, saying ‘yes’ would prove much more committal, exposing her to possible sexual advances in your home. Uncertain of what to expect, she would become anxious.
Learn how to set time constraints smoothly for any situation. Time constraints can be used to boost your desirability through scarcity, ease the pressure of an invitation, or force a woman to react intuitively rather than logically to your bold advance.
In order to exploit the scarcity principle, a seducer must first become desirable. Centenarians and midgets are both very scarce, but women do not desire them. There is a word for scarcity without value: forgotten.
Before creating scarcity, transform yourself into a paragon of desirability by improving your socioeconomic position, physical and personality traits. Make yourself attractive. Then make yourself scarce.