Many movies and fantasies usually revolve around the idea of “love at first sight.” You know, that warm and fuzzy feeling you get the first time you lay eyes on “the one”. How true is this idea? What’s behind those butterflies and jaw drop a lot of people seem to experience?
The first thing many people notice about someone is their physical attractiveness. This attention to another’s attractiveness is due to a form of the primacy effect, “the tendency to be especially influenced by information that is presented first” (Gruman, Schneider, & Coutts, 2016). Someone who is attractive is going to easily catch your eye. Along with physical attractiveness, we can engage with someone through words and actions. As stated in the text, even if you are having a conversation over the phone with someone for the first time, our imaginations can try to gauge just how attractive this person is (Gruman, Schneider, & Coutts, 2016). So, this feeling of immediate infatuation is often common and difficult to determine the level of attraction.
People also typically associate good things with good looking people. A lot of times, people who are physically attractive fall under a certain stereotype. This stereotype alludes to the idea that because these people are attractive, they possess positive qualities in contrast to someone who may be seen as conventionally unattractive having negative qualities (Gruman, Schneider, & Coutts, 2016). However, because this is just a stereotype and not a fact, this could be shocking when someone who is attractive turns out not so nice. Due to this surprise, love with someone like that may not be possible.
In the text, it states that the term attraction almost suggests a type of force (Gruman, Schneider, & Coutts, 2016). Many people seem to believe that having an attraction this strong to someone who you just met is considered “love at first sight”. Depending on how you define love in a relationship, it does not seem likely that this quick infatuation is considered love. It is not likely that you are going to experience a situation like this because many people need to open up and learn someone before they can make a decision on whether they love this new partner or not. You may feel attracted to someone immediately upon seeing someone, but this idea of “love at first sight” is more fantasy than realistic.
References:
Gruman, J. A., Schnieder, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied Social Psychology (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publication Inc.
In most cases, the first impression we have of people is based on their physical appearance because it is the only information we have readily available to us. This wouldn’t be case however, if there was something else available for us to make our judgements. Alan Gross and India McHale created this study where individuals wore T-shirts with personal information about them and they found that the information on the T-shirts were enough for other individuals to form impressions based on something other than physical appearance (Gruman, Schnieder & Coutts, 2016). These findings tell us that yes, physical appearance does matter when we initially meet someone if we do not have other information available to form an image of them. I think a more accurate or realistic way of putting the statement, “love at first sight” is by calling it “lust at first sight”. Feeling lust is more of a desire and when you meet someone new, their presence still remains a mystery and one may feel the desire or compelled to get to know them better. Thank you for the read!
References:
Gruman, J. A., Schnieder, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied Social Psychology (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publication Inc.