These days I am reading Anna Fels: Necessary Dreams, a book that analyzes how and why women’s ambition may be socially chastised.  Fels, a psychiatrist, defines that ambition aims both at mastering a skill, and at earning the corresponding public recognition, i.e. positive attention.  Apparently it is the attention bit that women are not supposed to earn, but lavishly shower on men. She quotes John Gray who strongly recommends that Venus appreciate (i.e. give positive attention to) Mars, basically all the time. – This is an issue at all because the amount of recognition in space is not infinite. We all have limited attention spans.

The key reason why attention is such a hot commodity is that it defines us: from childhood we shape our view of ourselves through the attention and remarks we are getting from others. Kind of an empirical data collection on ‘who am I’. A second cool thing about attention is the Hawthorne effect: if we receive genuine, interested attention to what we are doing, we become better at it. We grow.

Fels is onto something. Having these effects in mind can do wonders for your dating. By giving positive attention to your date, you can make them feel better about themselves, and develop the actions and inclinations you would like to see. It’s not manipulation, because the effects only work if the attention is genuine. We kind of knew the trick since ‘Mars and Venus’;  the news is that it works both ways, for Mars and for Venus.

Sidebar, it then dawned on me that the Hawthorne effect can also explain what faith does to people – another big fuzzy topic economists are tempted to get their hands on. If you pray – and think that God is watching you – you receive genuine attention from the most competent being there is. You become better at what it is you are collecting attention for and you grow. Next to other things, faith is one gigantic Hawthorne effect.