Break-Up Blues

One of my really good friends here at SU, "Amanda", had a high school sweetheart that she had been dating for five whole years. They spent so much time together and they seemed like the perfect couple, to the extent that everyone thought they were eventually going to get married. That is why it was a HUGE surprise when I found out yesterday that he had left Amanda for another girl. Needless to say, all of her friends, especially me, were shocked. Someone even sent her his "condolences", as if someone had died!

Today, I was watching TV with Amanda, who was still pretty shaken up. Much to her dismay, a commercial came on that showed a woman crying and saying that her boyfriend had left her. Ordinarily, we would not have even noticed this commercial, because it was pretty goofy and inconsequential. But, Amanda was primed to notice the commercial because it was related to everything that had been on her mind for the past 24 hours, and she therefore became even more upset. That is, she noticed the commercial because recently acquired information or circumstances tend to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information (Higgins et al., 1977). She told me that, even within just that one day, there had been so many things that reminded her of her ex-boyfriend--she had heard the song that was his ringtone, as well as another song that they both liked, and then this commercial came on that reminded her of the situation all over again. The breakup with her boyfriend was constantly on her mind, so she was more easily reminded of it by things in her environment than she normally would be.

Amanda also fell victim to the primacy effect--the tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later (Asch, 1946). Amanda is a very driven, intelligent person who hopes to be a professor. She is even a Brown scholar at SU, which tells you just how smart she is. When she first met her ex-boyfriend in high school, he was intelligent and fairly motivated as well. They had similar ambitions in life and she saw him as an intellectual equal. However, I did not find out until after they broke up that he had actually gotten kicked out of UT earlier this semester because his grades were too low. She said all he does with his time is play video games and intramural sports. She never mentioned this while they were dating, perhaps because she was able to overlook his recent laziness in favor of his earlier ambition. That is, because her first impressions of him were so positive, she "tuned out" his later behavior, only seeing the motivated person she first started dating five years ago. It was only after they broke up that she was able to see him clearly.

Higgins, E.T., Rholes, W.S., & Jones, C.R. (1977). Category Accessibility and Impression Formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 141-154.

Asch, S. E. (1946) Forming impressions of personality, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290