Social Psychology

BY
AJITH KUMAR.T
Interpersonal
Attraction:
From First Impressions
to Close Relationships

“Try to reason about love, and

you will lose your reason.”
—French proverb
 What Causes Attraction?
The absence of meaningful relationships with
other people makes people feel lonely,
worthless, hopeless, helpless, powerless, and
alienated.
In this chapter, we will discuss the antecedents
of attraction, from the initial liking of two
people meeting for the first time to the love
that develops in close relationships.
 The Person Next Door:
The Propinquity Effect
One of the simplest determinants of
interpersonal attraction is proximity
(sometimes called propinquity).

Propinquity Effect
The finding that the more we see and
interact with people, the more likely
they are to become our friends.
Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950) tracked friendship
formation among the couples in various apartment buildings.
Residents had been assigned to their apartments at random.
Most were strangers when they moved in.
The researchers asked the residents to name their three closest
friends in the entire housing project.
Just as the propinquity effect would predict, 65% of the friends
mentioned lived in the same building, even though the other
buildings were not far away.
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 The Person Next Door:
The Propinquity Effect

The propinquity effect occurs due to

mere exposure.

Mere Exposure Effect

The finding that the more exposure we
have to a stimulus, the more apt we
are to like it.
 COMPUTERS:
LONG-DISTANCE PROPINQUITY
Researchers found that strangers who met on the
Internet were more attracted to each other than those
who met face-to-face.
Whether people on the Internet were attracted to each
other was largely determined by the level and
quality of their conversation, while face-to-face
meetings depended on other variables as well, such
as physical attractiveness.
 COMPUTERS:
LONG-DISTANCE PROPINQUITY
Chan and Cheng (2004) found that the quality
of offline friendships was higher than that of
online for relationships that had existed for up
to a year.
However, when friendships had existed for
longer than a year, the online and offline
relationships were very similar.
 Similarity
Researchers describe two types of situations in
which relationships begin:
• Closed-field situations, in which people are
forced to interact with each other.
• Open-field situations, in which people are
free to interact or not as they choose.
 Similarity
Propinquity increases familiarity, which leads to
liking, but something more is needed to fuel a
growing friendship or a romantic relationship.
(Otherwise, every pair of roommates would be best
friends!)
That “fuel” is similarity—a match
between our interests, attitudes,
values, background, or
personality and those of another
person.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
 Similarity
Folk wisdom captures this idea in the expression “Birds of a
feather flock together” (the concept of similarity).
But folk wisdom also has another saying, “Opposites attract”
(the concept of complementarity, or that we are attracted to
people who are our opposites).
Luckily, we don’t have to remain forever confused by
contradictory advice from old sayings.
Research evidence proves that it is overwhelmingly similarity
and not complementarity that draws people together.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

 OPINIONS AND PERSONALITY
IN DOZENS OF CONTROLLED
EXPERIMENTS, IF ALL YOU KNOW
ABOUT A PERSON (WHOM YOU’VE
NEVER MET) ARE HIS OR HER
OPINIONS ON SEVERAL ISSUES, THE
MORE SIMILAR THOSE OPINIONS ARE
TO YOURS, THE MORE YOU WILL LIKE
THE PERSON.
 INTERPERSONAL STYLE
WE ARE ATTRACTED TO PEOPLE WHOSE
INTERPERSONAL STYLE AND COMMUNICATION
SKILLS ARE SIMILAR TO OURS.
RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE WHO DO NOT SHARE
YOUR INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION STYLE
ARE FRUSTRATING AND LESS LIKELY TO FLOURISH.
THIS IS PROBABLY A GREAT PREDICTOR OF
SATISFACTION IN RELATIONSHIPS AND MARRIAGE
—AND OF BREAKUPS AND DIVORCE!

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

 INTERESTS & EXPERIENCES

THE SITUATIONS THAT YOU CHOOSE TO BE IN ARE,

BY DEFINITION, POPULATED BY PEOPLE WHO
HAVE CHOSEN THEM FOR SIMILAR REASONS.
STUDENTS IN THE SAME ACADEMIC TRACK SHARE
MANY OF THE SAME EXPERIENCES.
NEW SIMILARITIES ARE CREATED AND DISCOVERED
BETWEEN THEM, FUELING THE FRIENDSHIPS.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

 INTERESTS & EXPERIENCES
Why is similarity so important in attraction?
1. We tend to think that people who are similar
to us will also like us, so we are likely to
initiate a relationship.
2. People who are similar validate our own
characteristics and beliefs.
3. We make negative inferences about
someone who disagrees with us on
important issues.
 Reciprocal Liking
People with a negative self-concept respond quite
differently:
• Such people indicate that they’d prefer to meet and
talk to a person they know has criticized them earlier
than meet and talk to a person they know has praised
them earlier.
• Thus if people think of themselves as unlikable,
another person’s friendly behavior toward them will
seem unwarranted, and they may not respond,
setting in motion another self-fulfilling prophecy.
 Physical Attractiveness and Liking
• Physical attractiveness also plays an
important role in liking.
• People from different cultures perceive facial
attractiveness quite similarly.
• The “what is beautiful is good” stereotype
indicates that people assume that physical
attractiveness is associated with other
desirable traits.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

 Physical Attractiveness and Liking
• Genders differences in the importance of
attractiveness are greater when men’s and women’s
attitudes are measured than when their actual behavior
is measured.
• It may be that men are more likely than women to say
that physical attractiveness is important to them in a
potential friend, date, or mate, but when it comes to
actual behavior, the sexes are more similar in their
response to the physical attractiveness of others.
 WHAT IS ATTRACTIVE?
High attractiveness ratings are associated with
female faces with:
• Large eyes
• Small nose
• Small chin
• Prominent cheekbones • Narrow cheeks
• High eyebrows
• Large pupils
• Big smile
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
 CULTURAL STANDARDS
OF BEAUTY
Attractive faces for both sexes are those whose
features tend to be the arithmetic mean—or
average—for the species and not the
extremes.
This does not mean a composite “average” face
has all the physical qualities that people
cross-culturally agree are highly attractive,
though.
 THE POWER OF FAMILIARITY
Familiarity also underlies the other concepts
we’ve been discussing:
• Propinquity (people we see frequently
become familiar through mere exposure),
• Similarity (people who are similar to us will
also seem familiar to us), and
• Reciprocal liking (people who like each other
get to know and become familiar with each
other).
 Equity Theory
PROPONENTS OF EQUITY THEORY DESCRIBE
EQUITABLE RELATIONSHIPS AS THE HAPPIEST AND
MOST STABLE.
IN COMPARISON, INEQUITABLE RELATIONSHIPS
RESULT IN ONE PERSON FEELING:
• OVERBENEFITED (GETTING A LOT OF REWARDS,
INCURRING FEW COSTS, HAVING TO DEVOTE
LITTLE TIME OR ENERGY TO THE RELATIONSHIP),
OR
• UNDERBENEFITED (GETTING FEW REWARDS,
INCURRING A LOT OF COSTS, HAVING TO DEVOTE
A LOT OF TIME AND ENERGY TO THE
RELATIONSHIP).
Companionate Love
People can experience companionate love in
nonsexual relationships, such as close
friendships, or in sexual relationships, where
they experience great feelings of intimacy
(companionate love) but not a great deal of
the heat and passion they may once have felt.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Passionate Love
Passionate love involves an intense longing for
another person, characterized by:
• The experience of physiological arousal,
• The feeling of shortness of breath, and
• Thumping heart in loved one’s presence.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

ATTACHMENT STYLE COMBINATIONS
ANXIOUS AND AVOIDANT PEOPLE BECOME
COUPLES BECAUSE THEY BOTH MATCH
EACH OTHER’S RELATIONSHIP SCHEMA:
• ANXIOUS PEOPLE EXPECT TO BE MORE
INVESTED IN THEIR RELATIONSHIPS THAN
THEIR PARTNERS.
• AVOIDANT PEOPLE EXPECT TO BE LESS
COMMITTED THAN THEIR PARTNERS.
• Attachment theory does not mean that if people had
unhappy relationships with their parents, they are
doomed to repeat this same kind of unhappy
relationship with everyone they ever meet.
• People can and do change; their experiences in
relationships can help them learn new and more
healthy ways of relating to others than what they
experienced as children.
• In fact, it may be that people can develop more than
one attachment style over time, as a result of their
various experiences in close relationships.
 Social Exchange in
Long-Term Relationships
• Couples were found to focus more on rewards during
the first months of their relationships.
• If the relationships were perceived as offering a lot of
rewards, the people reported feeling happy and
satisfied. The perception of rewards continued to be
important over time.
• At seven months, couples who were still together
believed their rewards had increased over time.

• Rewards are always important to the

outcome; costs become increasingly
important over time.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
The Process of Breaking Up