So, your true love surprised you tonight with a diamond engagement ring. Sitting in its high, strutting mount, the jewel proclaims, I'm beautiful, and valuable, and therefore, I am rare. Yearn for me!"" Most of us accept the logic behind this yearning: An attractive thing must be valuable, and being valuable, it must be rare.
Xianchi Dai, a visiting scholar at the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business said that many companies apply this psychology in the business world and employ this perception in their marketing strategies.
""The basic assumption in economics is that resource scarcity promotes competition,"" Dai said. ""They know consumers will value a product if they perceive it is scarce, particularly when they run promotions claiming a product is 'running out soon.'""
But according to Dai, very little research has examined just how people get the idea that something is scarce to begin with.
Through a set of studies published in the January issue of Psychological Science, Dai discovered that people form opinions about scarcity based on the perceived value and attractiveness of the object at hand.
Taking their cue from the business world, Dai and colleagues manipulated the value of objects shown to a group of college students. They wanted to know if the students would infer that something was rare if it was assigned a higher value than another object.
First, the students were shown a random mixture of either bird or flower images on a computer screen. Afterwards, they were split into either a bird group or a flower group. Each group was instructed to estimate how many bird or flower images they saw. As an incentive, they were promised two cents for each image they recalled. To raise the stakes, they were promised an additional Euro for guessing within five of the actual number.
Because a value was suddenly placed on each category, the group responsible for counting birds overwhelmingly underestimated how many birds they saw; the same held true for the flower group.
In actuality, both groups were shown equal numbers of birds and flowers, demonstrating that experimentally induced value created a subconscious sense of scarcity in the participants' minds.
In another test, Dai swapped out the pictures of birds and flowers for images of men and women.
Males were shown a random selection of male and female pictures and were asked to estimate how many female pictures they saw. In this case, the value of female images was not experimentally induced but was considered ""intrinsic"" because males would naturally value the image of a female, particularly if she was deemed attractive.
As with the birds and flowers, the male students significantly underestimated how many female pictures they saw. Because they were shown an equal number of males and females, these results suggest that female images that were considered unattractive didn't hit their radar, creating the sense that females were more scarce than they actually were.
The same held true for females reporting on the number of male pictures they saw.
When asked if the study factored in cultural notions of beauty, Dai said, ""The conclusions across cultures would be the same."" In other words, however people determine attractiveness, they are still using a value and scarcity system to make that assessment.
As Dai's tests showed, value heuristics often do not accurately reflect reality. For example, in the diamond scenario, the reality is that sapphires are more rare, but because they are not deemed as beautiful as diamonds, they are not as highly valued.
In a follow-up study that has yet to be published, Dai examined the short-term and long-term consequences of this value system in humans. The study concluded that when people place a higher value on something that is attractive, it can have both positive and negative behavioral consequences.
In the long term, ""It motivates you to work harder to get something that is attractive,"" Dai said.
In the short term, however, placing a high value on an attractive object could have detrimental effects.
""If you see a watch that you really like, in the short term, you might be willing to pay more money for it, or even steal it,"" Dai said.
So on the one hand, the dating battle cry ""There are no good mates out there!"" may have more to do with not actually seeing the available people around you out of a belief that they exist in some rarified space. On the other hand, Dai's follow-up study suggests it can be well worth the effort to pursue that attractive mate once you find (or notice) him or her.
And for anyone considering popping the question: Give a sapphire a closer look.
