FONTAINEBLEAU, France, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- Many seeking a soul mate think all the good prospects are taken, but because a "true love" is valued, it only seems that way, French study says.
Xianchi Dai, Klaus Wertenbroch and Miguel Brendl at INSEAD, a business school in France and Singapore, say the "value heuristic" is a sort of cognitive short cut people use when they are unable to make a truly informed decision.
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 researchers told participants they would get paid a few cents either for each bird picture or for each flower picture they had seen, and all participants were asked to estimate the total number of bird pictures and the total number of flower pictures they had seen.
The study, published in Psychological Science, finds people who were paid for spotting flower pictures thought there were fewer flowers than birds, while those who were made to value birds more determined they were scarcer than flowers. Nobody knew that, in fact, there were exactly the same number of flowers and birds, the study says.
