Psychology of Seduction
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According to the story, Scheherazade selflessly endangered herself to save the lives of other women in the kingdom from a cruel, vindictive king. A more cynical interpretation, grounded in evolutionary psychology, suggests that Scheherazade sought to demonstrate her superiority over other females by entertaining the king and thereby surviving his wrath. In the process, she raised her status.
Remember Scheherazade when you interact with women. Females absolutely love a challenge, and they especially enjoy competing with other women for the attention of a desirable man. Create a dynamic of lower-status women vying for your attention as a high status male. Seduction is most effective when you play multiple women against each other, forcing them to compete for your attraction. Although you can’t behead women who displease you, ignoring their phone calls and emails is the next best thing.
According to Geoffrey Miller in ‘The Mating Mind,’ women also use the ‘Scheherazade strategy’ to maintain a man’s interest during a long-term relationship. Men tend to seek younger, more attractive women. By entertaining a husband through fascinating conversation, stories or poetry, a woman helps alleviate the man’s boredom and curtails his wandering eyes. The ‘Scheherazade strategy’ enables a woman to preserve a long-term relationship, diverting her husband from sexual novelty seeking.215
Miller’s keen insight is tarnished only by his omission of the role status plays in the Scheherazade strategy. In a long-term pair bond or even a short-term relationship, the person with lower mate value employs the ‘Sheherazade strategy.’ Higher mate value implies greater sexual opportunities, requiring the inferior partner to employ a variety of strategies, including Scheherazade’s technique of entertainment, to maintain the pair-bond. A beautiful young woman married to a burger-flipper has no incentive to enthrall her man. Since she can easily obtain a better mate, the role of Scheherazade and the king are reversed; her husband must use his wile and charm (if he has any) to ensure her faithfulness.
By increasing your status, wealth, appearance and desirability to the opposite sex, you can position women into competing for your attention by playing them against each other, maintaining multiple seduction prospects simultaneously. It helps if you’re also a king.
How to Walk Like an Old Person
Human emotions can be ‘primed’ by events of which we are hardly even aware. Psychologists discovered that when we are exposed to positive and happy images, we become positive and happy. Negative images make us sad. Seems obvious, but the effect is more subtle than that.
In a famous experiment by psychologist John Bargh at New York University, students were asked to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example: ‘finds he it yellow instantly’). For one student group, half the scrambled word groups contained words associated with geriatrics, such as Florida, bald, gray, forgetful, or wrinkle. After assembling sentences from the mix of ‘old people’ words, the young students were dispatched to perform another exercise in an office a few doors away. The real experiment focused on the students’ short walk down the hall. The researchers measured how long it took for people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. Bargh correctly predicted that students who constructed a sentence from words with the geriatric theme ambled down the hallways considerably more slowly than students who assembled a sentence from neutral words. This classic experiment gave rise to what is called the ‘Florida Effect.’ The concept of old age had not entered their conscious awareness, yet their actions had nevertheless been affected. The ‘elderly’ word group unconsciously primed their behavior.216
Priming affects choices as much as actions. In another experiment, subjects were shown a happy, sad or neutral face for one sixtieth of a second. Researchers then asked them to drink a ‘novel lemon-lime beverage.’ The subjects drank more of the beverage after observing happy faces than sad ones and they were willing to pay twice as much for the privilege. Apparently a happy face primes us to accept the drink as more pleasant while viewing a sad face spurs us to avoid it entirely. No wonder advertisers bombard us with images of happy people.217
Venues can prime your thoughts and emotions. In a study of voting patterns in Arizona, researchers found that support for propositions to increase school funding was much greater when the polling station was located in a school rather than a neutral location nearby.218
An experiment conducted in an office kitchen at a British university confirmed that images can impact our emotions and behavior. Members of the office helped themselves to tea or coffee, dropping money into an ‘honesty box’ with a list of suggested prices displayed. For a period of ten weeks, an alternating daily image of either flowers or eyes was displayed above the price list. The amount of money people dropped into the box increased significantly on days when they saw eyes rather than flowers above the price list. Apparently, the picture of eyes primed them for honesty. Here’s looking at you, kid.219
What are the implications of priming for the psychology of seduction? The best time to meet a new woman is when she enjoys a positive mental state. PMS? Bad idea. Her dog just died? Run.
One’s mood during an initial encounter is critical to establishing attraction. Positive feelings create attraction while negative feelings destroy desire. Sex researcher Cindy Meston explains that ‘ …anyone or anything simply present when positive or negative feelings are aroused also tends to be liked or disliked as a consequence. .. if other people just happen to be there when your feelings are good, you tend to like them; if your feelings are bad, you tend to dislike them.’220
Put on your detective hat and try to determine when a woman feels happy and positive. Approach a woman only when she is in an upbeat state of mind.
Your neocortex is a complex biological auto-associative memory device. At each waking moment, every functional region of the brain keeps vigilant watch for familiar patterns to appear. Hence you can think deeply about something at work, but your thoughts involuntarily switch to your friend the minute she walks into your office. The mere appearance of a stimulus forces your brain to recall patterns associated with the stimulus.
You can exploit auto-associative memory as a priming device by asking questions about known positive events in a woman’s life to trigger memory patterns corresponding to those positive events. If possible, insert yourself into her memories: ‘If I was there, I would have …’
TIP: Priming for Attraction
When writing letters, notes, emails or text messages to a woman, create a positive priming effect by using upbeat, happy words. Insert sexual innuendo and subtlety into your messages to prime her for a sexual encounter.
Create a positive priming affect by choosing a romantic date venue associated with happiness and enthusiasm. Forget museums. Amusement parks combine excitement, happiness and a little fear – all wonderful components of successful seduction. Go somewhere bright, exciting and bursting with energy. Ideal venues for dating include amusement parks, zoos, the circus, festivals, and fun shows. Never bring a woman to a museum, art gallery (unless she REALLY loves art) or any dark, quiet, melancholy place.
Movie dates are boring, suggesting lack of originality. If you can’t think of a more exciting place to bring a woman, then make sure to watch a horror movie. An action flick may put your date to sleep - she’s not interested in seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger blast away the bad guys. Even worse, a serious drama or tearjerker will prime negative emotions. Ever see Requiem for a Dream? It’s a wonderful date flick – for men who prefer to walk home alone.
Heading to a local bar, club or show? Aim for happy, upbeat, exciting music rather than metal, goth or jazz. Closely connected to emotions, music creates an immediate positive or negative priming effect. Unless you’re on a date with a corpse, avoid the ‘goth’ scene entirely and treat jazz gingerly. Sad is bad.
The Commitment Principle
Where I grew up in the ghetto, the drug dealers were all professional psychologists – or at least they acted like it. Walking home from school each day, I
kept my head down, careful not to catch the eye of the dozens of street pushers who called out ‘hey, yo’ as I slouched past them. Back then, in the 1980s, you were either ‘slingin’ crack rock or you had a wicked jump shot.’ Nobody wanted to work for it.
As my fellow high school colleagues walked by, the pushers would give out free samples of various toxic chemicals, such as crack cocaine or crystal meth. They always wanted you to smoke it right there with them, presumably so you couldn’t resell the smack for a profit. The upshot of this public drug use was that everyone at my school knew who was ‘using’ and who was ‘clean.’ All you had to do was walk home with your eyes open, and you could see the ‘bad kids’ smoking up with the pushers. And the cops? They didn’t give two shits.
The street villains were probably just trying to get the local kids hooked on dope, but they were inadvertently using what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the ‘commitment principle.’ Whenever one takes an action or makes a choice, particularly in public, one is driven to maintain that stand in order to appear consistent. By encouraging the local punks to use drugs in public, they helped these kids redefine their own self-images as drug users. The kids knew, and their friends knew, and pretty much the whole neighborhood knew, that they had become drug addicts. Having made a public commitment to drug using, it became almost impossible for these kids to kick the habit, lest they appear inconsistent with their new self-image. The pushers might not have read ‘The Psychology of Influence,’ but they were nonetheless behaving like expert salesmen.
Psychologists have found in numerous experiments that once you have committed yourself to something, you tend to remain consistent with your current beliefs and behaviors. According to Dr. Cialdini, the commitment principle is ‘our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done or decided.’ Once we have made a commitment to an idea, behavior, concept or institution, we encounter powerful personal and social pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. The mind is like a one-way street; u-turns are strictly forbidden.
One of the pioneer researchers of the commitment principle and cognitive dissonance was Dr. Leon Festinger, who ran a series of famous experiments in the 1960s. Festinger asked undergraduates to perform boring menial tasks such as sticking a set of pegs into a board. Even a monkey could do it. Some subjects were paid $20, while others only received $1. After the experiment, the psychologist asked his volunteers how much they liked the task. Amazingly, people who were paid well confessed to being bored, while people who were paid poorly claimed they enjoyed shoving all those little pegs into holes. Not wanting to admit that they wasted their time for little money, they rationalized that they actually enjoyed the work. Festinger proved that we have an inner drive to maintain all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony, avoiding disharmony and rationalizing any new idea that comes into conflict with the old. 221
Seduction applications abound. If you ask a woman to dance and she accepts, or you trick her into giving you a kiss on the cheek, or you get her to admit something positive about you, then you have already succeeded in imperceptibly altering her self-image. In order to remain consistent with past behavior, she is a little more likely to agree to further requests, such as slipping you her email or phone number, or following you home for a drink.
Make a girl commit to you, publicly, by getting her to make some public show of commitment. Even a small concession like a kiss on the cheek or a spin on the dance floor may be a slippery slope to deeper commitment.
Our desire to remain consistent evolved because it confers advantages in both natural and sexual selection. Consider love. A man who professes his undying love for a woman will be more likely to enjoy her sexual favors than the man who says the same thing a little less convincingly, without really believing it.
Do you like your boss? Come on, be honest. A person who actually despises his boss, yet consciously feels only admiration and a sense of personal inadequacy, gains a competitive advantage over a colleague who is aware of his own rage toward an abusive superior. It behooves us to fool ourselves – sometimes a little, and sometimes a lot.
The same argument could be applied to a teacher-student relationship, whereby the student’s feelings of disgust toward an incompetent teacher are buried so deeply in his subconscious that they hardly interfere with his performance in school. We assume (or want to assume) that evolution shaped the brain for an accurate perception of reality, but much evidence exists that, in many situations, distorted perceptions of reality enhance survival and confer sexual benefits. Natural and sexual selection do not care about objective ‘truth.’ Nature cares only about survival and making babies. (Obviously, nature doesn’t ‘care’ about anything at all, but you get the point.)
In plain English, we fool ourselves to remain consistent with our own self-image, which is defined by our previous actions, thoughts and behaviors.
Salespeople exploit the commitment principle by asking their subject a seemingly harmless question like ‘how are you doing this evening?’ This tactic works because people will find it awkward and embarrassing to appear cheap after acknowledging their own favorable circumstances.
The commitment principle works best when we publicize our commitment. We remain truest to our decisions if we have bound ourselves to them publicly. Maneuver a woman into kissing you in public, especially in the presence of her friends and peers. The commitment principle suggests that she will convince herself that she likes you in order to remain consistent with her public display of affection. She will also be more likely to comply with larger requests later on, such as an invitation to your home.
TIP: Make Her Commit
Exploit the commitment principle by maneuvering your target into expressing some small measure of desire for you. Ask her for a brief kiss, even on the cheek. Rare is the woman who would rebuff a playful request for a kiss on the cheek. Get her to admit that she likes you – even just a little. Extract a small concession of affection to increase your chances of gaining compliance for larger requests. She will convince herself that she likes you to remain consistent with her previous behavior.
Lowballing is a dirty psychological trick based on the commitment principle. You can use a false promise (of money, engagement, gifts, anything …) to convince someone to commit to a specific behavior. Then you remove the promise after the commitment has occurred. Amazingly, people tend to be even more committed after you snatch away the dangling carrot. Absent any hope of reward, the removal of the pretense of external motivation ensures that the subject becomes even more convinced of her own dedication. She made a commitment based on the initial promise of some reward, redefining her own self image, and now she must live up to that image for the sake of consistency.
In an impressive real-world study, psychologists asked Iowa homeowners to conserve energy by offering them energy-saving tips. As expected, this direct method did not result in any energy savings whatsoever. Researchers then contacted another group of homeowners, promising to publish their names in the local paper and describe them as conscientious, fuel-conserving citizens if they agreed to save energy. It worked. One month later, the average energy savings was 12%. Here’s the catch; psychologists then sent the homeowners a letter informing them that they could not publish their names after all. Even after removing the dangling carrot, energy savings among these homeowners still accounted for 15% throughout the remainder of the winter months. In this experiment, psychologists used ‘lowballing’ to help homeowners redefine their self-image as fuel conservationists.222
You can use lowballing to make a woman commit to you even though commitment may not be in her best interests. Bait her with a false hope by emphasizing your potential job prospects, desire to build a nice house, or promise to improve yourself by quitting gambling or avoiding all-night benders. Once she has committed to you, simply go back on your word. According to psychologists, she should remain committed, becoming even more devoted than before you lowballed her.
Another psychological tactic based on the commitment principle is known as the ‘foot in the door’ technique. Salespeople use the ‘foot in the door’ method to ensure compliance with larger requests after convincing their target to first agree to a smaller request. Marketers know that agreeing to trivial requests often results in agreeing to larger requests.
This technique works because of the circular, self-reinforcing nature of behavior and belief. A person uses his own behavior as a barometer of his Self; one’s own behavior is a source of information about one’s beliefs, values and attitudes.
Each of us has a strong desire to appear consistent in our choices and beliefs. Once we agree to a small request, we maintain our consistency by agreeing to a larger request of a similar nature.
Psychologists Freeman and Fraser conducted the seminal study on the ‘Foot In the Door Technique’ back in 1966. In the experiment, a researcher posed as a volunteer worker, asking homeowners in California to permit a large, ugly public-service sign reading ‘Drive Carefully’ to be posted in their front lawn. Only 17% of homeowners allowed the sign in their yards. Researchers then asked a different set of homeowners if they would accept a small ‘Be a Safe Driver’ sign. Almost everyone agreed. Two weeks later, a ‘volunteer worker’ then asked those same homeowners whether they would allow the larger ‘Drive Carefully’ sign, achieving 76% compliance. Simply by asking for a small concession first, Freeman and Fraser were able to quadruple the compliance rate.