Cupid? Love at first sight? No, self -essence reasoning dictates who you fall in love

When it comes to love, there are no magical formulas or specific methods to understand how it works. Some associate it with spiritual issues such as destiny or cupid, while others believe that it is common points. In this sense, a new study about love relationships discovered a so far unknown factor in love: self -essence reasoning. According to work, this is a factor that has a lot of weight in interpersonal relationships.

It seems that when we know a person, we tend to overvalue certain aspects of his personality. That would arouse the attraction to the other and lead us to establish a link with them. This tendency to overvaluation of personality is a key aspect of self -essence reasoning.

Content

• What is falling in love?
• What is self -essence reasoning?
• The study
• Not everything is as simple how it seems: hormones and other factors
  • References

What is falling in love?

In a basic sense, falling in love is a feeling where a set of pleasant sensations converge and that indicate attraction towards another person. Most people have experienced falling in love at least once in their lives. As a social species, human beings feel inclined to create links with others, so this is common.

Following this line, if we ask people what is falling in love with them, they may give us many different answers. However, in many cases, there are those who associate the attraction to another with the fact of finding someone similar to us. For example, someone with whom musical tastes, life objectives or perspectives on certain topics are shared in common. Some define this common connection as a kind of "essence" that characterizes someone.

In order to better understand this “essence”, a group of researchers from the University of Boston developed a study. In this way, they could better define the concept of self -essence reasoning that would explain the reason behind the attraction towards others. While it would not be the only factor involved, it would have a key role in the process.

What is self -essence reasoning?

Continuing with the above, the study authors observed that, in general, it is enough to have a common point to establish a link. For example, having the same political perspective can be a key element to decide whether we want to establish a friendship with someone or a romance.

Based on this, it is intuited that people consider that they have an essential core in their personality that differentiates them from others. For this reason, they would assume that others also have said nucleus or essence and would use it as a way to decide if there is attraction.

The cause of this could be the fact that an individual handles a lot of information about himself. But, it would not have the same amount of information about others and their personality. Consequently, a tendency would be created to filter people taking into consideration things that we consider part of our essence or core. To this would be given the name of self -essence reasoning.

The study

In order to verify the influence of this type of reasoning in interpersonal relationships, they interviewed a group of people. The participants were talked about a fictional character and their opinions on topics such as abortion, euthanasia and possession of weapons. Other issues were animal tests and death penalty.

Each participant was spoken about the character and his opinion about one of the previous topics. Then, a survey was applied to explore the identity of each and their tendency to search for self -essence.

In this way, they realized that those who inclined to self -essence, chose to establish a relationship with the fictional character. For example, if they shared the same opinion about abortion with this character, they were open to having a relationship with this. Even if they did not know their perspective about the other issues, which could be quite different.

Then, it is observed how self -essence reasoning leads people to overvalue one aspect of the personality of another. As we share a common point, we assume unconsciously that we will also be more or less agree on everything else. This is a mechanism that helps us deal with the uncertainty of not knowing anything about the other.

To verify their claims, the authors repeated the experiment with a variation. In this case, they asked people to calculate the number of blue points in an image. Then they evaluated whether people would have a relationship with the fictional character based on the similarity of their calculations. Indeed, participants with a tendency to self -essence chose the character with which they had a similar calculation.

What is love?

Not everything is as simple how it seems: hormones and other factors

Despite the above, we must bear in mind that love is not an emotion so simple as to depend on a single variable. Autoessecialism is just one aspect that the authors of the study consider essential at first to establish a link. That is, we know the person and judge whether or not we are based on what we consider their personal essence.

But, this is just the first step, then hormones such as dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins that generate the other sensations of falling in love enter. Then, the time spent together, the quality of time they share and other factors will participate in romance.

In conclusion, self -essence reasoning plays an important role in the initial attraction we feel for someone. But, it is not the only thing that determines whether or not we fall in love with a person. In addition, we must bear in mind that judging someone for a single factor can lead us to establish frustrating relationships. As well as we could miss the opportunity to meet interesting people. The ideal would be to take enough time to really meet others.

Types of love in pairs What is yours?

References

• Chu, c., & Lowery, B. S. (2023). Self-Essentialist Reasoning Underlies The Similarity-Attraction Effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.