Lies Your TV Tells You About Love and Romance

Love and romance are common themes in TV shows and movies. Romantic comedies are always popular, especially among dating couples. As the trials and tribulations of sexual attraction play out on the screen, couples can hold their partner tight as they thank their lucky stars their own romantic adventure wasn’t nearly as arduous.

Sexual attraction often pops up as a theme in action movies as well. According to the trope, a man and woman who can’t stand each other are thrown into a series of dangerous situations in which they must cooperate for their own survival. Although they despise each other through most of their adventure together, by the time the villain has been vanquished, they can’t wait to tear each other’s clothes off. There actually is psychological research supporting the notion that exposure to danger can increase sexual attraction, so maybe the premise of these movies isn’t so unreasonable after all.

Media as a Mirror

We spend many hours a week consuming media entertainment, and our ideas about love and romance are greatly influenced by the shows we watch, sometimes in very subtle ways. According to media psychologists Asheley Landrum and Liesel Sharabi, who recently published a paper in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, entertainment media is a mirror that reflects societal attitudes. As such, it’s a significant source of misinformation about the nature of love and romance for viewers, but it also provides psychologists with a valuable window into widely held beliefs, whether these are true or false.

Landrum and Sharabi point out that entertainment media provide misinformation about love and romance in two different ways. In the case of blatant misinformation, media presents certain ideas as “scientifically proven” facts, which viewers willingly accept as true and often share with others. In the case of subtle misinformation, ideas embedded in the stories themselves are picked up by viewers as models for romantic behaviors. In their paper, the researchers provide an example of each kind of misinformation.

Blatant Misinformation

As an illustration of blatant information about love and romance in entertainment media, Landrum and Sharabi consider the reality TV show Naked Attraction, in which, as the title suggests, contestants vie for dates based on nothing more than how they look in the nude. While watching attractive people prancing about au naturel can be quite entertaining, the producers of the show promote it as educational.

In episode three, for example, the host discussed a purported scientific study that found “you really can judge a man by the size of his balls.” According to the host, researchers found that men with smaller testicles have lower levels of testosterone, which in turn suppresses mating behavior and redirects a man’s effort toward parenting behaviors instead. “Small balls might mean a bigger, better daddy,” the host concluded.

Although the host did not indicate where this information came from, Landrum and Sharabi found an article by Mascaro, Hackett, and Rilling (2013) that might be the source. In this study, the researchers did indeed find that men with smaller testicles exhibited a particular kind of brain activity thought to be associated with parenting behaviors. However, the relationship was quite small, and more importantly, the researchers never looked at actual parenting behaviors.

This study was picked up by the popular media, which exaggerated these meager findings with sensational headlines such as “Better Fathers Have Smaller Testicles” and “Choose Dads with Smaller ‘Nads.” No doubt, the writers for Naked Attraction got their information from popular science reporting, not exactly a reliable source of information for the latest in scientific findings. Even the authors of the original article acknowledged that their findings were only suggestive and not conclusive, and they ended their report with the same sentiment that concludes every science report, namely that more research is needed.

Subtle Misinformation

A fair amount of entertainment media masquerades as being educational, and an important component of scientific literacy is knowing how to judge the reliability of sources of information. But sometimes misinformation is presented in such a subtle form that we don’t even recognize the effect it's having on us. As an example of subtle misinformation, Landrum and Sharabi turn to that perennial favorite, The Bachelor.

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In one episode of season 21, one contestant starts by telling the bachelor that she knows he hasn’t always been successful in relationships and points out his failures. Then she changes her tone and tells him, “You’re a wiener in my book,” after which the two eat a hotdog together.

According to Landrum and Sharabi, this is an example of negging, an attraction technique developed by pick-up artists. The idea behind negging is that you can get a person to find you more attractive if you first make a negative comment to lower their self-esteem and then follow it with something more positive to rebuild it. This “boost” in self-esteem that they experience in your presence is then supposed to make you more attractive to them.

Negging may be a successful strategy for picking up one-night stands. Regardless, it’s a form of emotional manipulation, and it has no place in a healthy relationship. However, Landrum and Sharabi point out numerous examples in the entertainment media where negging is presented as a normal part of relationship dynamics.

Because we spend so much of our daily lives consuming entertainment media, we are easily influenced by the messages they send us, whether blatant or subtle. However, we need to keep in mind that the stories we watch of love and romance are not necessarily good models for happy, secure relationships in our own lives. Reality TV may be entertaining, but it’s far from real life.