Psychologists have about as many theories about love as economists have about investing, and they have about the same success in making predictions based on their ideas. Still, both sets of social scientists plod on regardless, presumably on the basis that if there's a market for oddball ideas they might as well try and serve it. Or maybe they're just hoping for a date.

There are plenty of cases, though, in which it appears that investors fall in love with their investments and regardless of how fickle or downright untrustworthy their squeeze's behaviour is they'll stick with them through thick and thin. Mostly thin. So maybe the psychology of love can tell us something about the psychology of investors?

Love Triangles

One of the problems with this love stuff is that is doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. In fact, when you start to prise apart the various meanings it seems quite likely that it doesn't mean the same thing to anyone. It's certainly not an area where psychologists have ever been able to agree – although that hardly makes it unique since putting two psychologists in a room and locking the door is the modern equivalent of cockfighting, with the added bonus of still being legal.

Robert Sternberg, for instance, came up with a triangular theory of love which is based on three scales: intimacy, passion and commitment. These different elements combine in specific relationships to form different kinds of love.

My favourite is fatuous love: passion and commitment but no intimacy. Go figure.

Love Pyramids

Love plays a different part in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. This is usually portrayed as a pyramid, to keep the general theme of shapes going. Triangles, pyramids, whatever. Anyway, Maslow's idea was that there are different types of needs which start from the basic physiological ones like breathing and end in self-actualization which is when one becomes everything one is capable of becoming. A skeleton, presumably, doesn't count.

Mid way up this hierarchy is the concept of love. Once the basics of breathing, eating and security are taken care of the next thing we need is to be loved and to give love. Unconditional love for a child, for instance, is necessary for it to achieve higher levels in the pyramid.

Rather more pragmatically Zick Rubin set…

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