This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Flowers, candy, sappy love songs.
Yep, Valentine's Day is just around the corner.
This week, we're going to talk about the social science of romance.
We'll tell you how to save cash on an engagement ring.
Turns out that the circumstances that surround the ring matter a great deal in about how much people are wanting to.
Pay for it and why it will be good for your marriage to buy that cheaper ring.
We'll also explore the relative merits of a guitar case or a gym bag as props in an experiment on attraction.
He's going to be like the Pied piper.
They're going to be following him wherever he goes.
Anne Bowers is a professor at the University of Toronto.
She studies how consumers determine how much to pay for wedding related purchases.
I was looking at how people sell wedding dresses, and what I noticed about how people sell wedding dresses is that it is a lot about the day, how happy their marriage was, how beautiful their wedding was, and they show a lot of photos that have nothing to do with the dress itself and a lot about the experience that they had.
And I wanted to look at how that impacted sales, but it's hard to do that statistically.
So I switched to looking at engagement rings.
She looked at online sales of engagement rings.
And if you've ever shopped for an engagement ring, you know that people buy engagement rings based on four things, cut, color, clarity and carrots.
But it turns out that the circumstances that surround the ring matter a great deal in about how much people are wanting to pay for it.
So I looked at about 1.5 million eBay transactions.