Chapter 10 - Interpersonal Attraction Flashcards
A central human motivation is ______________: 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.
self-expansion
List the determinants of interpersonal attraction
1) Propinquity effect
2) similarity effect
3) physical attractiveness
4) reciprocity - more important than 2 and 3 cos u get positive feedback.
What is the propinquity effect?
The finding that the more we see and interact with people, the more likely they are to become our friends. The people who, by chance, are the ones you see and interact with the most often are also the most likely to become your friends and lovers.
Why does propinquity work? What is the name of the effect in this case?
Propinquity works because of familiarity, or the mere exposure effect: the finding that the more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more apt we are to like it.
Familiarity breeds liking.
We typically associated positive feelings with things that are familiar (eg comfort food, songs we remember from childhood).
The same is true also for people we encounter. The more often we see certain people, and the more familiar they become, the more friendship blooms.
However, if the person in question is an obnoxious jerk, then the more exposure you have, the greater your dislike becomes.
But in the absence of negative qualities, familiarity tends to breed attraction and liking.
Use the idea of physical distance + functional distance to illustrate how propinquity effect works.
Residents had been assigned to apartments at random, and nearly all were strangers when they moved in.
The researchers asked residents to name their 3 closest friends in the complex.
Just as the propinquity effect would predict, 65% of the friends mentioned lived in their same building, even though the other building were not far away.
Patterns of friendship WITHIN the same building
Each building was designed with front doors only 19 feet apart, and the greatest distance between apartment doors were only 89 feet.
The researchers found that 41% of the next-door neighbours indicated that they were close friends, 22% of those who lived 2 doors apart said so, and only 10% of those who lived on opposite ends of the hall indicated they were close 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.
Use the idea of propinquity effect + mere exposure effect to see how interpersonal attraction works.
Wanted to test the hypothesis that seeing the same people in the same classroom for lessons all semester long increases your liking for these classmates
Tested this hypothesis by randomly assigning students on the first day of class to permanent seats for the semester.
That first day, they had students rate each member of the class on likeability and the extent to which they would like to get to know each other.
These initial ratings indicated that students who sat in neighbouring seats or in the same row had higher initial attraction scores than those seated far apart.
A year later, they asked these students to rate the members of their original class again in terms of how much they liked them, how well they knew them, and to what degree they were friends.
Those who had sat side by side or in the same row the prior semester were significantly more likely to be friends a year later than those who sat far apart
What is the similarity effect?
a match between our interests, attitudes, values, background or personality and those of another person. It is overwhelmingly similarity and not complementarity (oppositeness) that draws people together.
What are some determinants of similarity?
1) opinions and personality
2) interests and experiences
3) physical attractiveness
4) genetics
How do opinions and personality predict similarity?
The more similar someone’s opinions are to yours, the more you will like the person.
How do similar opinions and personality affect what gay people look for in choosing their partner?
In a study of gay men’s relationships, those who scored high on a test of stereotypically male traits desired most of all a partner who was logical - another stereotypically male trait.
Gay men who scored high on a test of stereotypically female traits desired most of all a partner who was expressive - another stereotypically feminine trait.
Similar personality characteristics are important for heterosexual couples and for friends.
How do interests and experiences lead to similarity?
The situations you choose to be in are usually populated by people who have chosen them for similar reasons. Thus, we choose to enter into certain social situations where we then find similar others.
Explain the role of interests and experiences in creating similarity with an example.
Eg: A study of the patterns of students’ friendships that focused on the effects of “tracking” (grouping students by academic ability)
Researchers found the students were significantly more likely to choose friends from inside their track than from outside
Clearly, propinquity and initial similarity play a role in the formation of these friendships
However, similarity plays another role too: Over time, students in the same academic track share many of the same experiences, which are different from the experiences of those in other tracks.
Hence, new similarities are created and discovered, fueling the friendships.
Shared experiences promote attraction
Provide evidence on how we are attracted to people who look similar to us.
Analysing the seating arrangement of college students in a library computer lab over a number of days, physical similarity does predict seating choice
Students who wore glasses sat next to other students with glasses far more often that random chance alone would predict
A second study found the same pattern by hair colour
We are often drawn to those who look like us, to the point where people are even more likely to ask out on dates others who are similar to them in terms of attractiveness level
3rd study: Participants in an experiment were introduced to a partner who was already sitting.
Handed a chair, they were told to have a seat, at which point the research team secretly measured how close to the partner’s chair they put down their own chair.
A separate set of researchers later evaluated photos of both the participant and the partner.
Pairs judged as more physically similar had sat, on average, closer to each other.
Explain how DNA can possibly lead to attraction.
Since people tend to make friends with others who live near them, and individuals of similar genetic ancestry may be more likely to share such geographical propinquity,
Perhaps certain genetic predispositions (eg an athletic build and good lung capacity) make people more likely to select certain activities and frequent certain locales (eg join a running club), which means that genetically similar individuals often end up doing the same thing at the same time at the same place.
What kind of people do we share more DNA with?
Friends tend to have more similar DNA than do strangers.
Found that participants shared more DNA with their friends than with strangers, to a degree that participants were as genetically similar to their average friend as they would be to someone who shared a great-great-great grandparent.
but cannot establish causal relationships
“Opposites attract” is applicable in long-term relationships. True or false?
False. Similarity, not oppositeness
Found that in long-term relationships, 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 these beliefs don’t actually exist.
When does being different from another person work in attraction?
Low-commitment relationship (ONS)
A lack of similarity does appear to play an important role in one type of relationship - low-commitment relationships (like flings or one-night stands). Thus, in low-commitment relationships, we may go out of our way to choose someone who is strikingly different from us. Such relationships resemble an adventure, but can be difficult to maintain over time as they are based on differences, and not similarities
Can reciprocal liking lead one to ignore the differences between them?
Yes.
Eg: When a young woman expressed interest in male research participants simply by maintaining eye contact, leaning towards them, and listening attentively, the men expressed great liking for her despite the fact that they knew she disagreed with them on important issues.
Whether the clues are nonverbal or verbal, perhaps the most crucial determinant of whether we will like person A is the extent to which we believe person A likes us.
If you just found out your crush likes you, would you still be inclined to look at attractive faces? Provide evidence
No. The experience of reciprocal liking is powerful enough to neutralise our basic tendency to pay more attention to attractive faces.
Used a computer program to present a series of opposite-sex faces to German research participants,
Immediately after each photo appeared, a geometrical shape was shown that required participants to respond quickly to a keyboard..
This procedure also allowed the researchers to measure which faces elicited the most visual attention from the respondents, and the results indicated that we have a tendency to linger and look longer at good-looking faces.
However, this applies less to participants who had previously been asked to imagine they had just learned that someone whom they had a crush on also had feelings for them. Disrupts their default focus on attractive alternatives.
Makes sense because if we continue to focus on attractive alternatives out there despite experiencing reciprocal liking, we will never get the chance to turn initial interactions into more meaningful, more sustained romantic relationships.
Men always value physical attractiveness in a partner much more than women. True or false?
No not always.
Reported: yes they value more
actual behaviour; both sexes are quite similar
Both genders rated physical attractiveness as the single most important that triggers sexual desire.
