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RicardoFonseca comments on Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Are there any studies that highlight which biases become stronger when someone "falls in love"? (Assume the love is reciprocated.) I am mainly interested in biases that affect short- and medium-term decisions, since the state of mind in question usually doesn't last long.
One example is the apparent overblown usage of the affect heuristic when judging the goodness of the new partner's perceived characteristics and actions (the halo effect on steroids).
Here is a study finding that "high levels of passionate love of individuals in the early stage of a romantic relationship are associated with reduced cognitive control": free copy / springer link
Also, while I was searching for studies, I found a news article saying this about a study by Robin Dunbar:
"The research, led by Robin Dunbar, head of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, showed that men and women were equally likely to lose their closest friends when they started a new relationship."
More specifically, the study found the average number of lost friends per new relationship was two.
Except there is no publicly published paper anywhere online, despite what the news article says, there are only quotes by Dunbar at the 2010 British Science Festival, which seems a bit suspicious to me, maybe suggesting that the study was retracted later.
It's not necessarily that the study was retracted. The news article from the Guardian you linked mentioned that the study was submitted to the journal Personal Relationships; this means it had not yet been accepted for publication. And indeed it looks like that study never got published there despite all the media coverage.
Actually it has finally come out, 5 years later! Burton-Chellew, M.N and Dunbar, Robin I. M. (2015). Romance and reproduction are socially costly. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 9(4), 229-241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000046
From the abstract
Nice! Good to know the information is (more) reliable after all :)
A study that relies only on self-reported claims of 'being in love' might be interesting to read, but such a study would be of higher quality if there was an objective way to take a group of people and sort them into one of two groups: "in love" or "not in love." Based on my own experience and experiences reported by others, I wouldn't reject the notion that such a sorting is possible in principle, although it may be beyond our current technological capability. The pain associated with being suddenly separated from someone that you have 'fallen in love with' can rival physical pain in intensity. What type of instrumentation would we need to detect when a person is primed for such a response? I have no idea.
No, not automatically. An objective measurement can be both worse and be better than a self-reported measurement. There no reason to believe that one is inherently better.
New material added to this thread uses the phrase being in a relationship rather than being in love. I found the latter phrase problematic because it involves a poorly defined mental state that has changed meaning over time. The former phrase is objectively verifiable by external observers.
I have read a book or two on the Design of Experiments over the years purely for intellectual curiosity; I've never actually defined and run a scientific experiment. So I don't have anything worthwhile to say on the general topic of the relative value of objective vs. subjective measurements in scientific studies.
Why do you think "a person being primed for feeling pain when being separated from their new partner" matters here?
Are you thinking about studies that, at the very least, suggest the possibility of such a separation being an option that the subject will experience based on the outcome of some action/decision being studied? :( that's horrible ):
An objectively verifiable indication that an animal has pair-bonded would be a visible indication of distress when forcibly separated from his/her mate. I'm not suggesting that this is the best way to determine whether an animal has pair-bonded. For example, an elevated level of some hormone in the blood stream (a "being in love" hormone) that reliably indicates being pair-bonded would be a superior objectively verifiable indication (in my opinion) because it doesn't involve causing distress in an animal.
I'm not a biologist - just an occasional recreational reader of popular works in biology. So, my opinion isn't worth much.
Right now, it seems that "passionate love" is measured in a discrete scale based on answers to a questionnaire. The "Passionate Love Scale" (PLS) is mentioned in this blog post and was introduced by this article in 1986.
In my other reply to my original comment I showed a study that finds that "high levels of passionate love of individuals in the early stage of a romantic relationship are associated with reduced cognitive control", in which they use the PLS.