From NPR.
This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
If you had to choose a romantic partner, would you pick someone who was equally wonderful to everyone, including you, or someone who was especially wonderful to you?
It's a question that fascinates Laaleen Anuk.
I am an assistant professor at University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
Laaleen and her colleague Ryan Hauser ran a set of studies to figure out if people want a partner who has equal opportunity in their attention or someone who reserves special treatment for them.
What we find in the paper is people want to be treated uniquely.
The urge to be treated special was so strong that people were willing to pay a price for it.
Take the example of a birthday message.
Imagine that your partner writes a Facebook message that is long and beautiful, but there's a catch.
Your partner writes this sort of long birthday message all the time for everyone.
If this message goes to everybody, people say, I don't want that beautiful, thoughtful message.
Just tell me one liner that says happy birthday.
Why would people care so much about being singled out that they'd accept an inferior message?
If my partner sends me a beautiful message, that's a world in which she or he gives it to everybody else.
And that pie might be bigger, but it is divided into multiple parts.
And I think people have the feeling that they're getting less in the other world, where they send me a short, almost curt or cold message, but they don't do that for everybody else.
That means that the whole pie, although it might be smaller, it is mine, but it is all for me.
So many of us want our partners to give us the whole pie.