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From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos)
Newsgroups: net.singles,net.social
Subject: Re: What people look for in MOTAS
Message-ID: <904@peora.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-May-85 08:47:45 EDT
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Posted: Thu May  9 08:47:45 1985
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> I'm not necesssarily criticizing the article Frank is citing, but
> I'd want to see a lot of bibliography and coroborating evidence
> before I took PT's word for anything.

Um... we're dealing with PSYCHOLOGY here, a social science in which
essentially conflicting theories coexist, usually with substantial
corroborating evidence.  Not that I disagree with your criticism of
Psychology Today, though.

I must admit that I agree with Frank (for once :-)).  My observation is that
the majority of people, particularly younger ones who have not spent a large
portion of their time attached in some sense to one person, attempt to
approach their SO-selection [or whatever you wish to call this process]
with noble intent, looking for a long list of higher personal attributes;
but whatever they are looking for, their JUDGEMENT of these attributes is
heavily biased by their emotional perception of people, which tends to be
influenced by the person's appearance.  The problem being that people do
expect some emotional reward for an interpersonal relationship with another
person of the "MOTAS" category; and they can escape from this physical
attractiveness bias only when their perception of other, nonphysical but
emotionally-moving attributes become the primary ones.  This is why I said
"younger people, and those ... one person".  People who have had lasting
attachments with one person tend to make these emotional judgements by
transferrence (seeing properties of another person that remind them of
the person they knew before, which suggests to them in a subconscious way
that this person is in many ways like this other person), and thus are
subject to another kind of bias.
-- 
Full-Name:  J. Eric Roskos
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