Formation of personal relationships Flashcards
What are the three aspects behind the formation of personal relationships?
Biological, Sociocultural, Cognitive
What studies support the Biological formation of relationships?
Buss, Singh, Wedekind
What studies support the Cognitive formation of relationships?
Walster et, Byrne and Nelson, Aronson and Linder
What studies support the sociocultural formation of relationships?
Kenrick and Guiterres, Zajonc
Buss
‘men are trash’
-A woman’s mate value will be determined more by her reproductive capacity, focusing on youth and physical appearance, and by her chastity.
-A man’s mate value will be determined more by his ability to provide resources to look after his offspring.
- Just over 10,000 participants from 33 countries answered questionnaires based on biographical information, their desired age of marriage and ranking a number of characteristics based on how important the ppt considered them to be.
- these characteristics were for example chastity, good looks, financial prospects
-Females → value financial capacity of mates and ambition
Males → value physical attractiveness and youth
-Supports evolutionary theory of mate selection for both genders - patterns that are strongly supported across all (or most) countries point to biological mechanisms rather than cultural ones.
Singh
Slim Thick
- To explore the role of the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) in female attractiveness and to ascertain whether men perceive WHR to be correlated with some component of female fitness.
- Participants were shown twelve line drawings of women and asked to rank them in terms of attractiveness and then to give their top/bottom three in terms of: good health, youthful-looking, attractive, sexy, desire for children and capability for having children. The drawings represented underweight, normal and overweight women with WHRs of 0.7-1.0
- another study did the same experiment but with a wider age range
- Ratings for attractiveness (regardless of apparent weight) were highest for the lowest WHR as narrow waists = more attractive and normal weight was considered the most attractive.
- Body fat and its distribution play a crucial role in judgments of female attractiveness, health, youthfulness, and reproductive potential. All of these attributes are associated with a female figure of normal body weight and low WHR.
- WHR appears to be the only feature that accurately signals the reproductive capability of the woman and could act as a ‘first pass filter’ when forming relationships
- These findings fit within a wider body of research identifying similar patterns around the world and across time.
- use of different ages = reliable
- lacks mundane realism ( line drawings are not real life)
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What studies support the explanation for why relationships may change or end?
Bandura, Hazen and Shaver, Bowlby, Duck
Walster et al
Sketty Betty
-To investigate the likely success of being considered a selectively hard-to-get woman (hard to get for everyone bar one man, to whom she makes herself available).
-The ppts were recruited for a computer dating research project and presented with profiles of five women, whose descriptions were “different enough to be believable, yet similar enough to minimize variance.”
The men were told the women had already been in, had read the profiles of five men and had given their views on each (from “I definitely do not want to date this man” [-10] to “I definitely do want to date this man [+10]).
-Ppts could see that one of their five matches were consistently hard to get (rated each of their five men between +1 and +2), one was consistently easy to get (ratings between +7 and +9), one was selectively hard to get ( +2/+3 for four men, +8 for one), and two hadn’t yet expressed any views.
Ppts were asked for their impressions of the women, and for the one woman they wanted to date.
-he trend here is clear - the selectively hard-to-get woman (SHTG) is liked best and considered to be the most selective, the most popular, the most friendly, the warmest, the most easy-going and the least problematic of all the women.
- Hard to get woman = least liked, not popular, least friendly and easy going
- Easy to get women = least selective, most problematic to date, viewed as friendlier than the hard to get woman
Byrne and Nelson
wanting the same thing
- To “test the proposition that attraction toward a stranger is a positive function of the proportion of positive reinforcements received from that stranger.”
- Every ppt filled in a questionnaire regarding their attitudes towards various issues including gardening and Sci-Fi
- Responses were carefully analysed and ppts were then presented with the responses of another person (of the same sex). These responses had been manipulated so that the number of attitudes that the stranger shared with a ppt was set at 4, 8 or 16. The proportion of shared attitudes was also manipulated, so that the stranger seemed to agree with ⅓, ½. ⅔ or all of a ppt’s responses.
- Ppts were then asked, on the basis of this limited information about the stranger, to try to judge them on intelligence, knowledge of current events and morality
- that it was the proportion of shared attitudes that affected attraction, rather than the number of shared attitudes. That means that a stranger who shared 4/4 attitudes (100%) was liked more than a stranger who shared 16/32 attitudes (50%) despite having four times more shared attitudes than the first stranger
- The more of another’s opinions we know and agree with the more we will like them because their world-view validates ours, and hence boosts our self-view.
Kendrick and guiterres
-To investigate the claims that social comparison affects perceived attractiveness. Two male confederates went into university dorm rooms, where the male ‘ppts’ (they didn’t know they were part of a study) were either watching ‘Charlie’s Angels’ or they weren’t. The ‘ppts’ were asked to rate the attractiveness of a woman (1 = very unattractive, 7 = very attractive). See next slide for details.
-Male ppts were invited to take part in research to determine “how much we can tell about a person from only a brief encounter or glance.” Half were shown an example of a magazine advert with an attractive woman in it, while others merely had such an advert described to them.
Ppts were then asked to try to rate subsequent photos of a woman on various characteristics like being likeable and unlikeable on a scape where 1=best and 7= worst
- Study 1 = mean rating for Charlie’s angels were less than the controls
- study 2= mean rating for magazine condition was less
- exposure to unrealistically-attractive women in the media has a damaging effect on men’s judgment of beauty in the real world, although it wasn’t clear whether the men watching Charlie’s Angels were already highly selective when it came to judging beauty - their ‘taste’ in women might have affected their choice of TV programme and therefore the direction of effect was not obvious.
- 1= field study, 2 = lab experiment
- only male participants
- duration of this effect is not known
Zajonc
To consider the relationship between stimulus frequency and attitude. Participants, individually, were asked to look at a series of photographs of men, taken from a college yearbook( were told the experiment was about visual memory.
- The photos were presented for two seconds each and there being some men presented more that others and at the end of the presentations participants were asked to rate, on a seven-point scale, how much they might like the man in each photograph
- results showed that the women rates the men who appeared more as being more attractive giving evidence for the mere exposure effect
- HOWEVER can also have biological links because the mere exposure effect based on the idea that we have evolved a wariness of new things, because they might be dangerous. Organisms that don’t approach new things with caution are more likely to get attacked by dangerous new things. Therefore, until we are familiar with something, we will feel - unconsciously - a bit negative (fearful) towards it
