Rationalizing Madly on Valentine’s Day
February 14, 2013
The Wall Street Journal:
Call it the Valentine’s Day bias—the belief that, whether you’re attached or single, your own status is a kind of universal ideal.
The funny thing is that people often do this to cope with whatever dissatisfaction they may have with their own status—and the unlikelihood that their status will change.
Those are the findings of a trio of social scientists in a paper, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, called “ ‘The Way I Am is the Way You Ought to Be’: Perceiving One’s Relational Status as Unchangeable Motivates Normative Idealization of That Status.”
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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