This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Veda Anthony. 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 pie

piper, they're going to be following him wherever he goes.

And 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. And then I also ran an experiment of about 600 people. And I found that people

really want to ring that they perceive as pure and not tainted. And by tainted I mean from a

failed relationship. In the experiment, Bauer's offered the volunteers identical rings, but different

scenarios. The first condition was a store condition where they said, we have excess inventory,

and so we're selling the ring. Then we also had a happy marriage condition where the person said,

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