Ch. 10 Attraction and Relationships

Question 1

Attachment Styles

Answer 1

ATTACHMENT STYLES (Bowlby and Ainsworth) – The expectations people develop about relationships with others based on the relationship they had with their primary caregiver when they were infants.

• The key assumption of attachment theory is that the particular attachment style we learn in infancy becomes our working model or schema for what all relationships are like throughout adult life.
• SECURE ATTACHMENT STYLE – characterized by trust, a lack of concern with being abandoned, and the view that one is worthy and well liked.
  
  • As infants, these people cry and show signs of distress when their parent leaves the room and are quite happy when he or she returns. These infants tend to trust their caregivers, show positive emotions when interacting with them, and are not particularly worried about abandonment.
• AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT STYLE – characterized by difficulty developing intimate relationships because previous attempts to be intimate have been rebuffed
• As infants, these people do not react much at their parent’s departure or return. They desire to be close to their caregiver but learn to suppress this need, as if they know that such attempts will be rejected, sometimes by a caregiver who is aloof, distant, or busy.
• These are the least likely to enter into a relationship and the most likely to report never having been in love. They maintain their emotional distance and have the lowest level of commitment to their relationships of the three types
• ANXIOUS/AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENT STYLE – characterized by a concern that others will not reciprocate one’s desire for intimacy, resulting in higher-than-average levels of anxiety.
  
  • As infants, these people seem distressed even before the parent leaves the room and can be difficult to soothe even upon the parent’s return, their response often a mixture of anger and indifference. These infants are unusually anxious, sometimes owing to an inability to predict when and how their caregivers will respond to their needs.
  • The anxious/ambivalently attached individuals have the most short-lived romantic relationships.
  • They enter into relationships the most quickly, often before they know their partner well.
  • They are also the most upset and angriest of the three types when their love is not reciprocated.

Question 2

Love

Answer 2

LOVE AND CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS

COMPANIONATE LOVE – The feelings of intimacy and affection we have for someone that are not accompanied by passion or physiological arousal.

• People can experience companionate love in nonsexual close friendships, or in romantic relationships in which they experience great feelings of intimacy but not as much of the heat and passion as they once felt.

PASSIONATE LOVE – An intense longing we feel for a person, accompanied by physiological arousal.

STERNBERG’s TRIANGULAR THEORY OF LOVE – proposes that there are three major components to love.

1. INTIMACY – feelings of closeness and connectedness.
2. PASSION – physical attraction and drives that lead to sexual relations.
3. COMMITMENT – remaining together over time.

• As well as types of love that come with each combination of these 3 major components:
  
  • LIKING – Intimacy alone
  • COMPANIONATE LOVE – Intimacy + Commitment
  • EMPTY LOVE – Commitment alone
  • FATUOUS LOVE – Commitment + Passion
  • INFATUATION – Passion alone
  • ROMANTIC LOVE – Passion + Intimacy
  • CONSUMMATE LOVE – Intimacy + Commitment + Passion
• CROSS-CULTURAL:
  
  • American couples tend to value passionate love more than Chinese couples do.
  • Chinese couples tend to value companionate love more than American couples do.
• Research on 166 societies found evidence for passionate love in 147 of them.
• AMAE – the Japanese use the word amae as an extremely positive emotional state in which one is a totally passive love object, indulged and taken care of by one’s romantic partner, much like a mother-infant relationship. Amae has no equivalent word in English or in any other Western language; the closest is the word dependency, an emotional state that Western cultures consider unhealthy in adult relationships
• GAN QING – Chinese concept of gan qing – where a “romantic” act would be fixing someone’s bicycle or helping someone learn new material.
• Jung – In Korea, jung means much more than “love,” jung is what ties two people together. Couples in new relationships may feel strong love for each other, but they have not yet developed jung—that takes time and mutual experiences.
• romantic love is nearly universal in the human species, but cultural rules alter how that emotional state is experienced,
• Two major differences in American and Chinese dating couples’ decisions to marry:
  
  • Chinese students placed a heavier emphasis on two concepts central to their collectivistic culture:
    
    • – the obedience and devotion shown by children to their parents
    • – relationships as a network of connections.
  • American students placed importance on receiving support, care, and “living a better life.”

Question 3

Online Dating

Answer 3

CONNECTING IN A DIGITAL WORLD – Among pairs who had at least one mobile device (e.g., phone, laptop, tablet) present during the conversation, ratings of connectedness to and empathy for the other person were significantly lower than they were among pairs who interacted in the absence of such a device.

• Researchers found that the mere presence of the device decreased participants’ feelings of trust, closeness, and empathy with their conversation partner – like a “weapons effect” but with digital devices.
  
  • These effects were particularly pronounced when the pairs were instructed to discuss a personally meaningful topic, a scenario that, in the absence of a phone, would be expected to foster a sense of closeness among strangers meeting for the first time

ATTRACTION IN AN ONLINE ERA – Online attraction is much the same as face-to-face.

• Popular people like other popular people
• Similar levels of popularity and attractiveness tend to get together – remaining “in their own league”
• Familiarity increases liking with people who are pleasant, and decreases liking to people who are unpleasant
• The only difference is PROPINQUITY as the global connectedness has wiped out many of the restrictions and difficulties previously associated with distance. This makes PROPINQUITY much less of an impact in today’s digital age.

ONLINE DATING – Pros and Cons:

• Aggregating a large number of potential partners to sift through
• providing opportunity for communication with potential mates
  
  • Not much Empirical evidence supporting Algorithms that can point users toward ideally compatible mates – mostly because they try to match by personality style, which doesn’t work.
  • The best predictors of relationship satisfaction – like communication style and sexual compatibility – can’t be assessed until people actually get to know each other.
• Online profiles aren’t always accurate – 32% of profile photographs were judged to be deceptive or misleading, and females’ photos were found to be less accurate than males’.
• 3 giveaways that the profile you’re checking out online may not pass a reality check:
  
  • Deceptive profiles tend to have fewer first-person pronouns like I and me
  • Deceptive profiles make more use of negations, or negative turns of phrase
  • Deceptive profiles simply include fewer total words than accurate profiles.

Question 4

Perspectives on Attraction (Evolutionary)

Answer 4

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY – the attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection.

• Argue that men and women have very different agendas when it comes to mate selection, due to their differing roles in producing (and raising) offspring.
• For FEMALES, reproductive success lies in successfully raising each of their offspring to maturity. Reproduction is costly in terms of time, energy, and effort: They must endure the discomforts of pregnancy, the risks of childbirth, and, traditionally, the primary responsibility for caring for the infant until maturity.
  
  • Reproducing, then, is serious business, so females, the theory goes, must consider carefully when and with whom to reproduce.
  • Women, facing high reproductive costs, will look for a man who can supply the resources and support she needs to raise a child.
  • Women will respond to the economic and career achievements of men because these variables represent resources they and their offspring need.
  • Women valued ambition, industriousness, and earning capacity
• For MALES, reproductive success is measured by the quantity of their offspring. They pursue frequent pairings with many females in order to maximize their number of surviving progeny.
  
  • In comparison, reproduction is a low-cost, short-term investment for males.
  • Men will look for a woman who appears capable of reproducing successfully.
  • More precisely, men will respond to the physical appearance of women because age and health denote reproductive fitness.
  • men valued physical attractiveness in a mate
• Studies have shown that the top characteristics on both men’s and women’s lists were the same: honesty, trustworthiness, and a pleasant personality

ALTERNATE PERSPECTIVES ON SEX DIFFERENCES – Research has found that in some situations, women value physical attractiveness just as much as men – specifically, when they are considering a potential sexual partner as opposed to a potential marriage partner

• in many societies women need to rely on men to achieve economic security
• The more ECONOMIC POWER women had in a given culture, the more highly women prioritized a man’s physical attractiveness.
• NATURE AND NURTURE – The ENVIRONMENT also matters. Studies suggest that gender differences in mate selectivity do not simply reflect evolution or biology, but are also attributable to the established dating paradigm in most societies, in which men are the approachers and women the approaches.
  
  • Being approached gives you control, regardless of sex or gender; being approached also means feeling in demand and having options.

Question 5

Attractiveness Bias

Answer 5

• ATTRACTIVENESS BIAS – beauty matters – even when it shouldn’t.
  
  • Neonatal nurses appeared to respond more to the “prettier” infants and gave them better care.
  • Physical attractiveness is associated with a variety of benefits:
    
    • earn 10% to 15% more
    • Receive higher student evaluation
    • Helps win elections – ratings of attractiveness were the best predictors of the actual number of votes each candidate had gotten in the real elections.
    • HALO EFFECT – the perception that an individual possesses one positive characteristic makes us more likely to believe that he or she also possesses other (even unrelated) positive characteristics.
    • We tend to attribute to beautiful people other good qualities,
    • The beautiful are thought to be more sociable, extroverted, assertive, sexual, and popular.
      
      • That makes sense since those who are beautiful, from a young age, receive a great deal of attention that in turn helps them develop good social skills. (Self-fulfilling prophecy).
  • Beauty, Social Grace, and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy – an experiment where men thought they were talking to a person on the phone that they thought were either “plain” looking or “beautiful”, the men spoke differently to the “beautiful’ girl, causing her to respond differently in the conversation and to be perceived as more socially adept than the “plain” girl. This was the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• These Beauty stereotypes are cross-cultural (Universal).

Question 6

Culture and Beauty

Answer 6

• CULTURAL STANDARDS OF BEAUTY – people’s perceptions of beauty are similar across cultures.
  
  • Researchers have suggested that humans came to find certain dimensions of faces attractive during the course of our evolution.
  • Even infants prefer the same photographs as adults do.
  • SYMMETRY – is a preferred dimension in facial beauty.
    
    • Serve as markers of good health and reproductive fitness – facial symmetry is an indicator of “good genes”.
    • Photographs of Composite “averaged” faces were deemed more attractive because they had lost some of the atypical or asymmetrical variation that was present in the individual faces.
    • So by “average” here we don’t mean “average looking,” but features that appear to be of average size and dimension.
      
      • The composites of highly attractive faces were rated as significantly more attractive than the composites of average attractiveness faces.
  • In Individualistic cultures, the “beautiful” stereotype included traits of personal strength.
  • In collectivistic cultures, the “beautiful” stereotype included integrity and concern for others.

Question 7

Attraction

Answer 7

SELF-EXPANSION – the desire to overlap or blend with another person, so that you have access to that person’s knowledge, insights, and experience and thus broaden and deepen your own experience of life.

• A central human motivation is.
• PROPINQUITY – (also known as proximity). The people who, by chance, are the ones you see and interact with the most often are the most likely to become your friends and lovers.
  
  • PROPINQUITY EFFECT – The finding that the more we see and interact with people, the more likely they are to become our friends.
    
    • Attraction and propinquity rely not only on actual physical distance but also on “FUNCTIONAL DISTANCE,” which refers to aspects of architectural design that determine which people you cross paths with most often.
• MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT – The more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more apt we are to like it.
  
  • We typically associate positive feelings with things that are familiar, like comfort food, songs we remember from childhood, and even certain corporate logos.
    
    • The same is true for the people we encounter. The more often we see certain people, and the more familiar they become, the more friendship blooms.
    • CAVEAT: If the person is obnoxious, then the more exposure you have, the greater you DISLIKE them.
• SIMILARITY – a match between interests, attitudes, values, background, or personality.
  
  • In addition to propinquity, similarity encourages liking.
  • In fact, SIMILARITY is the most powerful force that draws people together.
  • The more similar someone’s opinions are to yours, the more you will like the person.
  • The situations you choose to be in are usually populated by people who have chosen them for similar reasons.
  • shared experiences promote attraction

SUMMARY of those things that ATTRACT US:

1. Propinquity
2. Similarity
3. Shared experience
4. Looks like us
5. They like us
6. They are hot
7. Symmetrical faces

• APPEARANCE – We are often drawn to those who look like us, people are even more likely to ask out on dates others who are similar to them in terms of attractiveness level.
  
  • Students who wore glasses sat next to other students with glasses far more often than random chance alone would predict.
  • People also tend to be drawn to others who are genetically similar to them – which means that genetically similar individuals often end up doing the same thing at the same time in the same place.
• ACTUAL VS. PERCEIVED SIMILARITY – individuals’ beliefs about how similar they were to another person predicted liking and attraction better than their actual similarity did.
  
  • Thus, feeling similar to another is what’s really important – so much so that we will sometimes create beliefs about the similarity between ourselves and intimate others even when they don’t exist.
  • Similarity is most important when we want a serious, committed relationship, and less so when we just want a “fling”.
• RECIPROCAL LIKING – We like to be liked. In fact, just knowing that a person likes us fuels our attraction to that individual.
  
  • Liking is so powerful that it can even make up for the absence of similarity
  • The most crucial determinant of whether we like a person is the extent to which we believe the person likes us.
• PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS – People overwhelmingly go for physical attractiveness, regardless of what they say.
  
  • men and women pay equal attention to the physical attractiveness of others.
  • This gender difference was greater when men’s and women’s attitudes were being measured than when their actual behavior was being measured.
  • Thus, it may be that men are more likely than women to say that physical attractiveness is important to them, but when it comes to actual behavior, men and women are fairly similar in how they respond to physical attractiveness.
• FAMILIARITY – When participants rated the attractiveness of faces, they preferred those faces that most resembled their own!
  
  • All of these factors predicting attraction are forms of familiarity – Propinquity, Similarity, Reciprocal Liking.

Question 8

Physical Arousal as a CAUSE of Attraction

Answer 8

PHYSICAL AROUSAL – sometimes physiological arousal is a CAUSE, rather than an effect, of our attraction to others.

• Men whose hearts were still racing after they walked across an arousal-inducing suspension bridge showed greater signs of attraction to a female researcher who approached them.
• Participants who had just gone on a roller coaster rated the stranger they were sitting next to as more attractive than those about to go on the ride.
• This attraction is a MISATTRIBUTION OF AROUSAL, meaning the men subconsciously attribute their physical arousal to the attractiveness of the woman instead of the true source (bridge or roller coaster)
• Images of a romantic partner activate dopamine release in the ventral tegmental area (VTA)** and the **caudate nucleus, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit in rewarding behaviors.

Question 9

Assessing Relationships (Social Exchange, Investment, and Equity Theories)

Answer 9

ASSESSING RELATIONSHIPS

SOCIAL EXCHANGE THEORY – The idea that relationships operate on an economic model of costs and benefits. How people feel about a relationship depends on their perceptions of:

• Its rewards
• Its costs
• The kind of relationship they deserve (Evaluated with COMPARISON VALUE)
• Their chances for having a better relationship with someone else.
• The more social rewards (and the fewer costs) a person provides us with, the more we like the person. The flip side of this equation is that if a relationship costs (e.g., in terms of emotional turmoil) far more than it gives (e.g., in terms of validation or praise), chances are that it will not last.
• In addition to rewards and costs, how satisfied you are with your relationship depends on another variable: your COMPARISON LEVEL, or what you expect the outcome of your relationship to be in terms of costs and rewards.
  
  • Some people have a high comparison level, expecting lots of rewards and few costs in their relationships. If a given relationship doesn’t match this lofty expected comparison level, they quickly will grow unhappy and unsatisfied.
  • In contrast, people who have a low comparison level would be happy in the same relationship because they expect their relationships to be difficult and costly.
• Satisfaction with a relationship also depends on your perception of the likelihood that you could replace it with a better one – or your COMPARISON LEVEL FOR ALTERNATIVES.
  
  • People who have a high comparison level for alternatives – either because they believe the world is full of fabulous people dying to meet them or because they know of one particular fabulous person dying to meet them – are more likely to hit the market for a new lover.
  • People with a low comparison level for alternatives will be more likely to stay in a costly relationship, because, in their mind, what they have may not be great, but it’s better than what they expect they could find elsewhere
• Social exchange theory has received a great deal of empirical support.
  
  • And observed cross-culturally
• Research suggests we need to consider at least one additional factor to understand close relationships: a person’s level of investment in the relationship:

INVESTMENT MODEL – The theory that people’s commitment to a relationship depends not only on their satisfaction with the relationship, but also on how much they have invested in the relationship that would be lost by ending it.

• The “investment” could include tangible things, such as financial resources, possessions, and property, as well as intangible things, such as the emotional welfare of one’s children, the time and emotional energy spent building the relationship, and the sense of personal integrity that will be lost if one gets divorced.
• The greater the investment individuals have in a relationship, the less likely they are to leave, even when satisfaction is low and other alternatives look promising.
• In short, to predict whether people will stay in an intimate relationship, we need to know:
  
  • (1) how satisfied they are with the relationship (Reward vs Cost)
  • (2) what they think of their alternatives (Comparison Levels)
  • (3) how great their investment in the relationship is.
• And maybe one more thing to consider in relationships: a person’s level of perceived fairness or equity in the relationship:

EQUITY THEORY – The idea that people are happiest with relationships in which the rewards and costs experienced by both parties are roughly equal.

• People don’t just try to amass rewards in relationships, they’re also concerned about equity or the idea that the rewards and costs we experience should be roughly equal to those of the other person involved.
• Equitable relationships as the happiest and most stable, whereas, inequitable relationships result in one person feeling over-benefited (getting a lot of rewards, incurring few costs, having to devote little time or energy to the relationship) and the other feeling under-benefited (getting few rewards, incurring a lot of costs, having to devote a lot of time and energy to the relationship).
• Equity is a powerful social norm and people will eventually feel uncomfortable and guilty if they keep getting more than they deserve in a relationship.
• Important to note that intimate relationships may be governed by a looser give-and-take notion of equity rather than a rigid tit-for-tat strategy.
• EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIPS – Relationships governed by the need for equity (i.e., for an equal ratio of rewards and costs).
  
  • People keep track of who is contributing what and feel taken advantage of when they feel they are putting more into the relationship than they are getting out of it.
• COMMUNAL RELATIONSHIPS – People give in response to the other’s needs, regardless of whether they get paid back. In this manner, communal interactions are the hallmark of long-term, intimate relationships.
  
  • In comparison, longer-term interactions between close friends, family members, and romantic partners are governed less by an equity norm and more by a desire to help each other as needed.
  • In communal relationships, the partners are more relaxed about what constitutes equity at any given time, believing that things will eventually balance out and a rough kind of equity will be achieved over the long run. If this doesn’t happen—if they continue to feel that there is an imbalance—the relationship may ultimately end.

Question 10

Breaking Up

Answer 10

BREAKING UP – relationship dissolution is not a single event but a process with many steps (Duck) theorizes that there are four stages to dissolving a relationship:

1. Intrapersonal phase – (the individual thinks a lot about his or her dissatisfaction with the relationship)
2. Dyadic phase – (the individual discusses the breakup with the partner)
3. Social phase – (the breakup is announced to other people) and back to the…
4. Intrapersonal – (the individual recovers from the breakup and forms an internal account of how and why it happened).

WHY RELATIONSHIPS END – four types of behavior that occur in troubled relationships:

1. Actively harming the relationship (DESTRUCTIVE)
2. Passively allowing the relationship to deteriorate (DESTRUCTIVE)
3. Actively trying to improve the relationship (CONSTRUCTIVE)
4. Passively remaining loyal to the relationship (CONSTRUCTIVE)

• Destructive behaviors harm a relationship a lot more than constructive behaviors help it.
• When one partner acts destructively and the other partner responds constructively to save the relationship, a common pattern, the relationship is likely to continue, but when both partners act destructively, the relationship typically ends.
• Another approach to studying why relationships end considers what attracted the people to each other in the first place.
  
  • in one study, men and women were asked to focus on a former romantic relationship to list the qualities that first attracted them to the person and the characteristics they ended up disliking the most about the person.
    
    • It turned out that the qualities that were initially so attractive became the very reasons why the relationship ended. Ex: “He’s so unusual and different” became “He and I have nothing in common.”
    • This type of breakup reminds us again of the importance of similarity between partners to successful relationships.
• CONTEMPT – A better predictor of whether and when a relationship will end seems to be how a couple deals with conflict.
  
  • When discussing issues related to relationship conflict, those couples whose communication shows signs of contempt, sarcasm, and criticism are more likely to break up.
  • Couples better able to weather the storms of conflict are those who wait to calm down before hashing out a disagreement and those who exhibit an ability to listen without automatically getting defensive.
• Finally, men and women tend to exhibit similar levels of distress after a breakup.