Don Juan Psychology -- Part II

Flogger

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Attitudes are Immediate

Some of this may sound vaguely familiar... Again, I'll try to radically simplify a lot research and put in DJ terms.

When someone first sees someone else, they immediately form an attitude about that person. What I mean by attitude is, for instance, "are they good/bad, approachable/dangerous, like-able, valuable," etc. To my immediate knowledge, no one has studied it directly, but I think we can reasonably assume this may also include appraisals of social worth, sexiness, etc.

And that attitude formation is immediate and automatic.

And it's based on stereotypes.

What I mean by stereotypes is probably close to what you're thinking. They're basically averages of every person someone has been exposed to in a given category. Let's take the case of the classic male professor. He's average height. He's got short hair with male-pattern balding (...naturally, I'm just taking this from my personal stereotype...), a medium or thin build, a beard, possibly thin-framed glasses, nice but nondescript clothing, maybe kakis with a button-down shirt. He's also intelligent, a little arrogant, not into idle chit-chat about sports, well-off but not rich, rather private, safe, mildly attractive, stable, secure.

Anyway, the stereotype is formed by seeing professors in class, on TV, any- and everywhere. When you encounter someone that meets that physical description, bam, the rest of the package is dusted off in your mind. With that, first and foremost, is an immediate formation of an attitude along very basic lines: as I said above, these likely include "he's safe, valuable, pleasant, etc." The stereotype is linked to these attitudes. Bad stereotype = negative attitudes; Good stereotype = positive attitudes.

The bottom line is that how you present yourself (especially visually) matters! And that's partly why. Realize, of course, that more subtle forms of expression are easily read by the mind. So, say, posture counts, as opposed to merely your build, height, and clothing.

"So what you're saying is, look better and you'll get hotter women?! No sh!t."

Yes, but the take home message is the timing of the appraisal. It's right when the ladies first see you that a good amount of filtering probably takes place. I'm just trying to translate some research into a form that's potentially useful to DJs. I have no control over whether it will impress you, but at least it promises to be fairly accurate.

In a club or bar, everyone will form immediate impressions of people they see. Those impressions will then likely act as a filter, and guide both sexes initially only to people for whom they have a good impression. Naturally, there will be plenty of exceptions. But insofar as dating is a numbers game, you can always up your odds for success by improving your visual appeal.

To really maximize your odds of success, enter the club with guns blazing.
 

legolas

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Flogger (why does that remind me of a disney movie?...anyway) I like this stuff you're posting. If you could go into more depth it would be appreciated. I also took pysch. in college and studied mostly social psych. I found the class on perception to be too Biology-biased. I also took social psych and I find persuasion very interesting. Of course the one you study in school is a bit boring.

What you call attitude formation, I like to call perceptual character (credit Dr. Sulo). When you see someone, you immediately create in your mind a one-dimensional percpetual chararacter. This isbased just like you say on the effects of primacy, recency, emotional charge etc. What I mean is that if you read a particularly perception changing post in here about chicks being "stupid" and then go out with that "filter" in mind then you're gonna see everything through that filter for a while.

Emotional charge has to do with the past, like if you see someone who resembles a gilr whom you fell in love with in the past, you'll tend to like this new girl even though you don't konw her at all. Primacy has to do with what happens first. Like you still remember your fist kiss, and if you see a girl who resembles that girl you kissed back then, you'll like this new girl more.

To take advantage of perception, you can do some things that improve your chances. Coming out with guns blazing is only a small part of it. It also depends on who you want to attract.

Do keep the perception discussion going, I'm going to follow it with pleasure. I'd suggest you keep it all in one thread so the pieces won't get lost. :woo:
 

Flogger

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Thanks for the additions and suggestions Legolas.

Alas, I'm not up on everything trendy in the social literature. Primacy and recency are familiar because the ideas (like alot of other social psych) were loosely inspired by perception and memory research. Emotional charge sounds much the schema/stereotype activation I was talking about above. Do you remember any of the major authors on it? I'd be happy for leads, reminders, or recommendations. My only policy is to keep the info based on well-demonstrated phenomena (i.e., generally not theories espoused and supported by only single labs/individuals).

I suppose you can link to other threads right? Maybe a the bottom of each I'll start adding a linked table of contents. Thanks again.
 

legolas

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Well unfortunately some of the research to support this stuff has come out of...believe it or not economics. There's this new bracnch called behavioral economics, I believe Danieal Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They've done a lot of research on decision making, but mostly focused in economics. Here's alink I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
but of course you can't trust wikipedia all that much. This is as far as I can get scientifically as I don't really care much about research, even though it's important.
 

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Thanks.

I'm pretty sure they won a Nobel, actually.

I'm very familiar with their decision heuristics.

If you think of anything else from your psych classes that sounded like it could be useful, please let me know.
 

catch

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first impressions...

so what youve just said is basically the reason why first impressions count so much and that is why they say image is every thing yeah...

so how do you create a cirtain image or first impression????

should it be posotive, confident, funny and out going? if so would your body language play the biggest role or the clothes you have on???? the way you do your hair or the way you hold your head up????

elaborate plzzzzzz....
 

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Originally posted by catch
so how do you create a cirtain image or first impression????
I'll probably be able to find info on what is attractive with respect to faces, and maybe a few other features, but how to knock women off their feet when they first notice you is not a typical research topic. I can look, but, just as a warning, I'm unlikely to find much that would be especially helpful in the scientific literature.


If you're looking for tips.. there are plenty on this site that seem to pass the real-life test.

For example:

Have clean, not cheap, well-fitting clothes; hair that you've taken care of; a build that suits your body (and not too fat or thin). Make you actions deliberate (i.e., slow, calm, and not timid). Have an erect posture, steady eye contact, etc. etc.

I can vouch for most of those from my personal experience.
 
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