Attractiveness - Attraction and The Misattribution of Arousal

Attraction and The Misattribution of Arousal

Misattribution of arousal is the process whereby people make mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do.

Field experiment done by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron (1974). In this experiment, Dutton and Aron had an attractive female experimenter stand at the end of either a scary bridge (which presumably increased participants’ arousal) or a safer bridge. After male participants walked across either bridge, the female experimenter asked them to fill out a survey and gave them her phone number to call if they had any further questions. The dependent variable was to see which group of men was more likely to call the woman. The men who walked across the scary (and arousing) bridge were more likely to call the woman, most likely because they misattributed their arousal from the bridge for arousal (and attraction) for the woman.