Half the Men Called Her Back After the Scary Bridge

On the Capilano River in North Vancouver, the suspension bridge runs 450 feet across a 230-foot drop and sways under your feet. In 1974, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron stationed an attractive woman at the far end. As men finished crossing, she stopped each one to fill out a short survey, then handed over her phone number in case they wanted to hear about the results.

The survey was a Thematic Apperception Test — a vague picture, write a story about it. The point wasn't the survey. It was who called.

Nine of the eighteen men from the suspension bridge phoned her. From a low, solid wooden bridge ten minutes away — same woman, same script — only two of sixteen did. The TAT stories told the same story: men on the high bridge wrote with mean sexual imagery of 2.47, against 1.41 from the low bridge.

Dutton and Aron read this as misattribution of arousal. Your heart is pounding from the bridge. A woman is talking to you. The brain, looking for an explanation, picks the one in front of it. Schachter and Singer had already argued in 1962 that emotion is a label your mind slaps on a body that's already aroused; the bridge made the label visible. The replication record since has been mixed — the effect is real but smaller than the bridge made it look — and yet every dating advice column that tells you to plan something thrilling for a first date is, knowingly or not, citing nine guys who picked up a payphone in 1974.