Love is Blind- Effect of Romantic Attraction on Self and Partner Perception

Love is blind, according to Shakespeare. Everybody would agree with that. Butdo we fall in love because we are blind, or does love turn us blind when we arecrazy about someone? Surprisingly little empirical research has been devoted totesting this important issue explicitly. In this book the author reasons that romanticattraction is an important motivational force that drives people todevelop biased perceptions of the partner and the self. In other words, it is morelikely that love makes us blind rather than blindness leads to love. In particular, itis hypothesized that romantic attraction leads to positively biased partnerperceptions (i.e., the positivity bias), enhanced self perceptions, and perceptionsof one's partner as overly similar to one's actual self (i.e., the similarity bias) andas overly similar to one's ideal self (i.e., the idealization bias). Two experimentalstudies were conducted to test these hypotheses. Study 1 used a sample ofindividuals who were single and attraction to a bogus partner was manipuated,whereas Study 2 used individuals who just started dating and attraction to theirreal partner was manipulated. Across different samples and different attractionmanipulations, robust and replicable evidence was found that increased attractionled to the positivity, similarity, and idealization biases. However, attractiononly had weak effects on self perceptions. Additional analyses suggested thatthe observed attraction effects could not be accounted for by mood effects.Implications for conceptualizing the causality link between attraction andperceptual biases are discussed. This book is addressed to relationship researchers,marital or family counselors or therapists, and more broadly, to social,personality, clinical, or developmental psychologists.