Love, Prototype Approach

What is love? This question, posed in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, is one that also has intrigued social scientists. In recent decades, many definitions and theories of love have been generated. In addition, research has been conducted to illuminate how ordinary people understand this concept. The purpose of this entry is to describe how ordinary people think about love (in general, as well as specific kinds of love), address whether women and men hold different views of love, and briefly discuss relationship implications of people's conceptions of love.

Most of the research on ordinary people's conceptions of love has been conducted from a prototype perspective. According to Eleanor Rosch, the founder of prototype theory, many of the concepts that are used in everyday language lack explicit, precise definitions. Instead, such concepts are [Page 1012]organized around their clearest cases, or best examples, which Rosch referred to as prototypes. For example, when asked to list types of fruit, most people mention apples and oranges—these are the prototypical cases. Figs and papayas are considered less prototypical. Tomatoes and avoca-does lie at the periphery of the concept and shade into the neighboring category of vegetables. Rosch demonstrated that the organization of concepts in terms of prototypes influences how people process information. For example, people are faster to confirm that a robin is a kind of bird than that a chicken is a kind of bird.

Other researchers subsequently explored whether more abstract concepts, such as love, might also be structured as prototypes, such that some kinds of love are seen as more representative of the concept than others. In one series of studies, people were asked to list the attributes or features of the concept of love. Features such as honesty, trust, and caring were listed with the highest frequency. Characteristics such as dependency, sexual passion, and physical attraction were listed relatively infrequently. In all, there were 68 features listed by more than one participant, suggesting that ordinary people have rich, complex knowledge of this concept. In follow-up research, other people rated these features in terms of prototypicality (goodness of example). Features such as trust, caring, and intimacy were considered central to love. These features map onto what social psychologists refer to as companionate love—a kind of love characterized by friendly affection and deep attachment to someone. Features such as sexual passion, gazing at the other, and heart rate increases received the lowest ratings. These features map onto social psychologists' definitions of passionate love. This prototype structure was confirmed using a variety of methods. For example, there was evidence that prototypical features of love, such as trust and caring, were more likely to be recalled in memory tests than were nonproto-typical features, such as physical attraction and sexual passion.

The initial studies on the prototype of love were conducted in British Columbia, Canada. In subsequent studies, other researchers tested whether similar findings would be obtained on the East Coast of Canada and on the West Coast of the United States, using university students and members of the public as participants. There was a remarkable degree of consistency across studies. Five features of love were listed frequently and received the highest prototypicality ratings in each of these data sets: trust, caring, honesty, friendship, and respect. The feature, intimacy, also received high ratings in each data set. Thus, at least within North America, among university students and nonstudents alike, there appears to be consensus that it is the companionate features of love that are seen as capturing the true meaning of the concept. Passionate features are seen as part of the concept, but on the periphery.

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