PhiloPsycho Freedom

To start this, I'll open with what studies show women tend to find physically attractive in men (assuming they're heterosexual). According to studies, when women are not ovulating, they find more feminine featured men attractive; a guy who, according to the theory, appears to be more likely to stick around and be supportive, should there be a child (rounder face, bigger eyes, more youthful (baby-faced), less aggressive, etc.). During ovulation, though, they look for men with more traditionally masculine traits: strong jaw, squarer face, more muscular, etc. The theory states that this is because they're looking to have a kid and want the best physical features available for their kid. (Interesting side-note: women tend to find the scent of men who have more different genes/immune systems more attractive (different from their own, that is))

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a rather tall guy: 6'7" in fact. Those who do know me clearly know this fact as well (maybe not in such detail, but generally speaking).

Having said that, I regularly get told that I'm tall, or asked whether I play basketball, football or whatever. My question about this is why is it alright to constantly point out this physical feature, but most other ones aren't. Don't misunderstand where I'm coming from, I don't care that much, but at times people need to wise up and stop telling me something I clearly know, especially when I'm trying to say something or the conversation is going well and they just drop that bomb that kills whatever was just being said.

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As related note to the last post, I probably should have done this one first. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is a model of persuasion proposed by Petty and Cacioppo back in the 80's. It says that we have two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.

Two factors dictates which route we take: our knowledge/ability to think about a topic, and our motivation to think about the topic. If you are high in both of these factors, you will engage in the high-elaboration, central route. If  you're missing either of these factors, or both, you'll default to the peripheral route. The central route is known as the high-elaboration route because we're more likely to want more elaborative information and to think about the information more thoroughly. So, if someone were to approach an existential nihilist and start making claims about the meaning of life, they would most likely consider the arguments and have the motivation to think about it. Once the motivation is there, we consider the argument: if we have favourable thoughts (according to the theory), we will accept the argument in whole, or in part; if unfavourable thoughts are evoked during the argument, we will reject the argument.