Misattribution of Arousal
In 1974, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron published an important paper on what the psychology literature calls misattribution of arousal. Their study involved having both a man and a woman stop men on a bridge and administer a questionnaire that included some basic questions and imagination exercises. After the questionnaire was filled out, the person administering the questionnaire offered his or her phone number and an offer to talk more about the study later. The researched did this on two different bridges. One rather scary rope bridge and one more solid bridge made of wood. What they found was that the men who talked to the woman on the scary bridge were somewhat more likely to come up with more sexual stories and much more likely to call up the person administering the questionnaire.
Dutton and Aron’s paper went on to describe a series of other experiments getting at the same phenomenon, including one in which they told male research subjects in the presence of an attractive women that they were going to be given either strong or weak electric shocks. They asked the men about how attracted they were to the woman and, sure enough, the men who thought they were going to be given the strong shocks described themselves as more sexually attracted.
The basic finding was that when men became excited — either because they thought they were going to be shocked or because they were dangling over a cavern — they confused their physiologically aroused state for one that was brought on by sexual attraction. The experiment’s subjects “misattributed” part of their their arousal to sexual attraction.
In the recent bestseller Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “thin-slicing”, or our instantaneous decisions — often based on physiological reactions — are often as good as or even better than carefully planned and considered ones. The concept has been given a huge amount of attention recently due to the popularity of Gladwell’s book.
Dutton and Aron’s work, and a host of work that came both before and after, provides a useful set of counter examples. While our basic reactions can be useful, our minds are not always very good at understanding why we feel what we feel. Feelings as basic as who we find attractive are influenced, often heavily, by our environment in ways we do not and perhaps cannot easily understand. Gladwell focuses on the way we make correct decisions quickly but there’s another side to that coin. Actions influenced by misattribution of arousal and of other physiological states are much more common than we know.