Social Interaction - Social Affiliation and Attraction Flashcards
The need to belong
- Baumeister and Leary, 1995:
- “Human beings have a fundamental need to form and maintain a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships”
- “We need relationships to survive and thrive”
the need to belong - evolutionary perspective
- Early humans lived in small groups surrounded by a difficult environment.
- Adaptive to be social and caring - more likely to survive, mature, and reproduce.
- Our species evolved and became characterised by people who were close to others, caring, and sought acceptance.
- Evolutionary perspective is speculative.
- But large accumulation of evidence supporting the idea of a fundamental, profound need to belong - better health and wellbeing.
the need to belong 2
- People have a fundamental need for social connection.
- The need to belong is like our need for food:
1. Relationships are easy to form and difficult to break
2. Without close connections, we suffer.
3. Our need to belong can be satiated
4. The need to belong universal
- The need to belong is like our need for food:
social bonds are easy to form and difficult to break
- Babies instantly form attachments
- Difficulty ending relationships
without relationships, we suffer
- Rejection hurts - pain, reduced wellbeing, intellectual functioning e.g., DeWall and Bushman, 2011
- Lack of social network is a strong predictor of illness and mortality (Coyne et al, 2001; Holt-Lunstad et al, 2010)
relationships and morality
- Subjective - living together/alone and marital status didn’t matter as much
- Together, these findings suggest that:
- Need to feel socially connected is a matter of life or death
- Especially important that relationships are highly satisfying (can truly fulfil need to belong)
the need to belong can be satiated
· We have a limited number of friends - 6 friends in college (Wheeler and Nezlek, 1977)
· People spend less time with friends when in romantic relationships
· Could be beneficial to expand social network, people need a sufficient number of relationships
the need to belong is universal
· People everywhere need (close) relationships
· Reviewed evidence does not seem culture-specific:
- Relationships everywhere are easy to form and difficult to break
· This universality suggests belonging is a basic need, that we share worldwide
Surviving or thriving? The quality of relationships:
· Relationship quality promotes surviving and thriving
· Pleasant daily social interactions associated with greater life satisfaction (Sun et al, 2020)
· Top 10% happiest people (compared to average and unhappy people) are highly social and have the strongest, most satisfying and fulfilling relationships (not per se romantic) (Diener & Seligman, 2002)
· Those that are thriving have the most satisfying relationships
Social interaction - quantity and quality:
· We have reviewed the benefits of:
- Having at least a good number of social interactions
- Importance of high-quality relationships
Other aspects of social interactions that benefit health and wellbeing
types of relationships
· Friends
· Family
· Colleagues, fellow students
· Romantic partner
· Strangers
“weak” ties
· Interactions with weak ties may be untapped resource for wellbeing
· Participants instructed to engage with barista (vs. efficient interaction) felt happier, due to greater sense of belonging (Sanderstron and Dunn, 2014)
· Even weak ties - strangers we can meet anywhere - contribute to our belonging and wellbeing
· Similar study replicated this idea
· Participants instructed to engage with bus driver: greet, expressing thanks (vs. no such instruction) felt happier
· Engaging with and being kind to others benefits wellbeing (Gunaydin et al, 2021)
“weak” ties - why?
· Positive interactions help us recognise value of others, feel connected (Algoe, 2012)
· Others typically feel happy and respond positively
“Weak” ties - but we tend to underestimate:
· How happy target will feel (Epley and Schroeder, 2014)
· How much people like us after a conversation (Boothby et al, 2017)
· Positive effects of our kind acts and expressions of gratitude (Kumar and Epley, 2022)
Social interaction - quantity, quality, and diverse:
· We have reviewed the benefits of:
- Having at least a good number of social interactions
- Importance of high-quality relationships
- Importance of weak ties
· Suggests there are benefits to interacting with a wider variety of relationships in our lives:
· Relational Diversity of people’s social profile - “… the richness and evenness of relationship types across one’s social interactions.” (Collins et al., 2022)
· Captures:
- How many different relationship types
- How evenly interactions distributed among types
· Relational Diversity & health and wellbeing:
· 4 studies (incl. daily study): ~50,000 participants!
- Replicates benefits of amount of interactions
- Additionally, benefits of relational diversity
· Actual interactions – what about perceived diversity and time spent with others?
What is attraction?:
· Evaluating another person positively (not just romantic)
· We are often attracted to people whose presence is rewarding (Clore and Byrne, 1974)
What are the forces that attract?
- Reciprocity
- Similarity
- Familiarity (proximity)
reciprocity
- We like people who like us
- We like others more after knowing they like us (Backman and Secord, 1959; Birnbaum et al, 2018)
- They like us specifically (not just everyone)
similarity
· Mostly: Birds of a feather flock together!
- We like people who are like us, especially when they have similar backgrounds (e.g., age, race, education), interests, and share attitudes and values (e.g., Hampton et al., 2019).
· Why?
- Trust others more when similar (Singh et al., 2017)
- Feel assured others will like us & enjoy spending time with similar others (Hampton et al., 2019)
similarity - not always
· Personality: similarity doesn’t really matter
· Actual traits (e.g., agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability) matter more than similarity on traits (Weidman et al., 2017)
- These traits generally make it more enjoyable to interact with people (Watson et al., 2014)
similarity - perceived
· Perceived similarity makes people like each other more than actual similarity (Tidwell et al., 2013)
· Perceived similarity increases the more relationships progress (Goel et al., 2010)
· Outside observers may see actual (dis)similarities and wrongly conclude that opposites attract
familiarity
· Familiarity (or proximity):
· The people who, by chance, you see and interact with the most (more familiar) are most likely to become friends or romantic partners
- “Contrary to popular belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best; they are merely the people who got there first.” - Sir Peter Ustinov
familiarity - MIT housing study
· Physical proximity & friendship formation
· Students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology were randomly assigned to one of 17 buildings in a housing complex on campus
· Virtually no one knew anyone in the complex beforehand
· 65% of the residents had at least one friend who lived in their own building
· But those living in the same building represented only 5% of all residents.
familiarity - how does it work?
- We have an increased opportunity to meet people who live close to us.
- We tend to like things more after we have been repeatedly exposed to them and they become more familiar to us.
· = mere exposure effect
· There’s a limit: initial disliking may breed contempt after further exposure
- We tend to like things more after we have been repeatedly exposed to them and they become more familiar to us.
