Deconstructing ABC's The Bachelor

If someone asked me what my guilty pleasure is, I’d have to say “watching reality TV”.  I’m fairly picky in the sense that I only have a couple shows that I watch with any regularity.  I generally only watch Jersey Shore and The Real World.  At times I feel that a show like Jersey Shore is beneath me, but I rationalize my habit by telling myself I’m only watching the show because it makes for an interesting case study in human behaviour.

This Monday I stepped out of my reality TV comfort zone and, for the first time in a few years, I watched The Bachelor.  This is one of the high-budget, low-brow, big network shows that I typically stay away from, but the concept of the show can also offer some interesting insight into the human condition.  I’ve often wondered what would motivate a young, attractive, professional woman to go on national TV to stand in line behind 29 other women for the miniscule possibility of finding love with a guy she hasn’t even met yet.

Then, once the women arrive, they uniformly swoon over the bachelor as they try to win his affection.  Some go so far as to profess their love for him within the first few episodes.  Under normal circumstances, one would expect at least a few of the women to bow out of the competition once they realize that the bachelor isn’t a good match for them.  But according to my internet research, this almost never happens.

Some viewers have speculated that many of the women only go on the show in hopes of launching a television career, and they don’t really care about the guy.  While I’m sure this is true in a small number of cases, I don’t think it’s sufficient to explain why so many women act against their own self-interest by participating in the show (some of them have put their careers on hold, or have left behind small children).

I think a better explanation is the concept of social value.  Pick-up artists, dating coaches, and others who study the dynamics of the dating game, have observed that people are most successful in attractive mates when they project value.  In other words, convince would-be mates that you are someone worthy of desire.  The idea’s power lies in its stupefying simplicity.

As with any commodity, the best way to project value is to demonstrate that the commodity is in high demand.  In the context of the dating game, this can be summed up succinctly as “admirers begat more admirers”.  This is why the contestants on the show fall so hard and so fast for the bachelor.  The show creates an extremely unusual set of circumstances in which the bachelor becomes the ultimate object of desire, and where the power dynamic is shifted to drastically to favour the bachelor.

The concept of social value can also extends beyond the dating realm, as illustrated on another reality show that is currently airing on TLC.  The show Sister Wives chronicles the lives of the members of a polygamist family in Utah.  The family appears to be part of one of the slightly less archaic Fundamentalist Mormon sects.  The women have jobs, and they all dress pretty normally.  For the four wives, although most claim to have grown up in polygamist households, the decision to become a sister wife doesn’t appear to have been forced on them.

So why would they choose to share their husband in such a grossly asymmetric arrangement?  I’m sure there are a few deep-seated psychological issues afflicting some of the women, (not to mention a prodigious helping of narcissism on the part of the husband).  But I also suspect that seeing their husband as the head of this mammoth family unit, with so many people depending on him to meet their needs, makes them more attracted to the guy.  Because he is in such high demand, the husband is seen as an object of desire, and so the women are willing to put up with having to share if it means they can enjoy the privilege of being attached to someone who is so important to so many people.

So in that sense, unlike with The Bachelor, everybody wins!