CONNECTIONS: Why Attractive Mates Seem So Scarce

Why is that special someone so elusive for so many people? Or that perfect job? Or that perfect community? Now, an international team of psychologists have found an answer: Our own longings seem to create an illusion of scarcity.
Researchers Xianchi Dai, Klaus Wertenbroch, and Miguel Brendl from INSEAD, the international business school with campuses in France and Singapore, have been studying cognitive shortcuts or “rules of thumb” we use when we are unable to make informed decisions about value. The connection between scarcity and value is something we readily accept; for example, gold is considered precious because it is rare. The psychologists theorized that we also accept the inverse: that what’s valuable must be scarce.
To test their theory, the researchers had a group of young people view nearly 100 pictures, half of birds and half of flowers, in random order. The participants were told that they would get paid for each bird or flower picture they had seen — birds or flowers determined by a flip of a coin. Before being paid, all participants were asked to estimate the total number of bird pictures and the total number of flower pictures they had seen.
The results: People who were paid for spotting flower pictures thought there were fewer flowers than birds, and those who were made to value birds believed there were fewer birds than flowers. In truth, there were exactly the same number of flowers and birds.
In other experiments, participants of both sexes viewed portraits of men and women, some attractive and some not. When questioned later, both men and women believed that there were fewer attractive people of the opposite sex than there were of the same sex.
In both experiments the participants appeared to be substituting their emotional desire entwined with a belief in scarcity for real calculation, suggesting that our cognitive shortcuts may have us assume (and perhaps live) more solitary lives than might be warranted by reality. (To read the study, see Psychological Science, January 2008.)