Interpersonal Attraction Flashcards
What is affiliation?
Sense of belonging
Fundamental for survival & happiness…
…If not met:
Depression, Sadness, Loneliness & Alienation
Why do we have this need?
Sense of belonging
Evolution: To survive, reproduce, provide support network in time of need
Social attraction:
Ancestry/attachment
Romantic affiliation: offspring (survival)
Shape emotions and sense of self
Aids wellbeing and happiness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995)
Determinants of Affiliation + Interpersonal Attraction
Physical: Proximity Familiarity Attractiveness Misattribution of arousal Similarity
Psychological: Need to affiliate Emotions Similarity of attitudes Mutual liking
Proximity effect -
Being or living close to others can facilitate attraction and relationship formation.
Familiarity: 1. Mere exposure:
Simply knowing of something may lead us to like it more
Proximity → familiarity
Familiarity: 2. Anticipating future interaction:
If we anticipate that we will need to interact with the person again, we will like them more (Klein and Kunda, 1992)
Darley & Berscheid (1967)
Familiarity: 3. Subliminal liking/disliking:
Your judgements of the ‘new’ person are clouded by your exposure to similar person in the past (Bornstein and D’Agostino, 1992).
Serves adaptive function in predicting environment
Physical: Attractiveness:
We judge others (and are judged by them) based on looks (Hatfield et al., 1966)
Physical Attractiveness Stereotype –
the tendency for people to assume that attractive people possess other socially desirable traits in addition to their looks (Dion et al., 1972).
Averageness effect -
People prefer average or prototypical faces to faces that have distinctive features (Winkielman et al, 2006)
Averageness -
diverse gene pool stronger and more able to fight off diseases, more reproductively fit (Grammer and Thornhill, 1994).
Attractiveness involve -
young, healthy and fertile (Jokela, 2009)
Excitation transfer –
a phenomenon that occurs when the arousal from one stimulus is added to the arousal of a second stimulus.
The matching phenomenon -
tendency for individuals to choose as partners people who are a similar match to themselves in terms of their physical attractiveness (Berscheid et al., 1971)
Need to Affiliate
The motive to seek and maintain relationships with others. (Baumeister and Leary, 1995)
Privacy Regulation Theory (Altman, 1975)
Ideal level of privacy (& need to affiliate) influenced by two factors:
Dialectic principle: Desire for privacy can vary from being open or closed to others
Optimization principle: Try to align our desired level of contact with our actual level of contact with others
Too little contact - feel isolated; Too much - feel crowded
the Need to Affiliate is to…
Understand our feelings and compare them with people who are sharing the same experiences and feelings.
Reduces anxiety and makes a person less fearful of events because their feelings are shared.
Affect -
Emotional state consisting of feelings and moods
‘Law of attraction’ -
attraction towards a person is directly – and linearly – related to the proportion of attitudes that one shares with that person (Byrne, 1971)
Complementarity -
The idea that people seek out traits in potential relationship partners that complement, or add what is missing, to their own (Sadler and Woody, 2003)
Dissimilarity leads to…
avoidance (Chen and Kenrick, 2002)
Balance theory:
(Similar attitudes - balance - positive emotional state)
Social comparison -
Validity of their own attitudes
Evolutionary perspective -
dissimilar others may present a danger to survival
A person’s attraction to another person is often determined by …
reciprocity (Dittes and Kelley, 1956)
