Welcome to lesson seventeen, module one. This is the first of two
lectures on attraction.
Let’s proceed by moving to slide two. A classic study done by Festinger
in 1950 and since often replicated, demonstrates how simply being near
other people makes you more alike. This is the mere exposure effect. Here
you see a diagram of an apartment building. Those that were most well
liked are living in apartments three and four. They have exposure to the
people at both ends as well as people that go upstairs, therefore these
people tend to have the most traffic by their doors and are most likely
to be seen. Next well liked are the other first floor occupants in one,
two, five and six. They’re liked because everyone on the second floor
has likely walked past them at some point. The least liked folks are
seven, eight, eleven and twelve. It would be very rare for them to have
exposure to one and two as frequently as one and two has exposure to
others in the apartment. This is mere exposure. It’s not saying that
they simply talk to one another or actually have any conversation or
friendship, but simply that being near or seeing someone often is often
enough to create some sense of attractiveness.
Let’s move on to slide three and discuss liking. Distance and
interaction. The closer you are, the more likely it is that you’re going
to be able to have some sort of liking for someone. This also increases
the likelihood of interaction. What we know is when people stand very
close to us or we live in close proximity for example in dorms or
apartment buildings that tend to be pretty crowded, we have what we call
an intensification effect. This means that if you sort of like them,
being near them makes you like them even more. However, as many of us
who’ve had a co-worker that we didn’t quite care for, the closer you
have to work with that person, the less you like them over time. It
intensifies or has an intensification effect in the direction of your
initial impression. Other things that contribute to liking are
familiarity. Everyone’s had the experience of seeing someone who looks
like another friend you have and you like that stranger just because
they seem familiar. This is why people don’t change brand logos rapidly,
they tend to let them evolve. So Betty Crocker in 1950 looks very
different than she does today on the box of cake mix. However, if you
examine closely, it’s been a slow evolution. It didn’t happen over night
because they know that people like what’s familiar. If they changed the
Betty Crocker image over night, people would have less liking for the
mix
today. Proximity also plays a role. That is, the closer you are in terms
of physical distance, the more likely it is that you’re going to like
that person. It would be very difficult to like someone on the other
side of the world or even in a town that you’ve never been to simply due
to proximal reasons. Very much common sense. Similarity works very much
the same way. People who are similar to us we assume have our positive
quality and we admire this in others. We like in others what we like in
ourselves. Disclosure also helps liking. Men and women do it for
different reasons. Males see disclosure as a tool to get closer to
someone, so if they’re trying to establish a friendship or relationship,
that’s when they tend to self-disclose, talk about personal issues or
things that are unique to them as a person. However for females, they
don’t use it as a tool to get close and often do it only once they do
feel close and then see it as an expression of that closeness.
Let’s move on to slide four. Moreland & Beach in 1992 had a confederate.
Remember from chapter two a confederate is someone who works for the
experimenter, come to class. This person came to class never, five
times, ten times, or fifteen times. What they found is that the more the
person came to class, the more others in the class liked this person.
The person never spoke to anyone, was never pointed out and did not
attend the class more than the specified number of times. The person did
not speak up in class, nor was the person known by others in the class
and yet this mere exposure was enough to increase liking, almost an
entire point in the attraction scale.
Let’s move on to slide five. Rozin, Millman & Nemeroff in 1986 did a
series of studies to demonstrate what we do with things that are
associated with those you like or dislike. They had laundered shirts.
These are clean shirts that had either been worn by liked or disliked
others. If I told you that the laundered clean shirt was once worn by
someone you didn’t like, you rated that shirt as less desirable. You
also were less likely to buy a shirt similar to that one. Throwing darts
at photos of likes versus dislikes. In this case they had people throw
darts at a dart board. On the dart board were photos of someone that the
person had liked or someone they dislike. When you like a person, it was
much harder to hit the target than when you didn’t like the person, even
though you were told that they would receive a reward for accuracy. In
addition, any time you made food resemble something disgusting or even a food
that is the same food in a different shape versus the same food in a
disgusting shape, what you find is that the disgusting food is eaten
less often. We call this sympathetic magic, it’s based on contiguity and
similarity. The ideas here are that once in contact, always in contact.
If that person wore the shirt, then that person somehow remains in
contact with that shirt. And also image equals the object. Whatever it
looks like, that must be what it is. An interesting point about the
laundered shirt study. If you look very closely at the brand name logo,
you will find that they typically put logos only on smaller shirts that
would fit a more thin woman or a more muscular man, but typically don’t
make shirts in large sizes or extra plus sizes that have a company logo
on them. This is because the company knows that they don’t want their
shirt to be associated, or their brand name rather to be associated with
someone that others might not find attractive.
Let’s move on to slide six. The WIBIG effect. What is beautiful is also
good. Agnew & Thompson in 1994 told people about an HIV positive
stranger. They either told them that this person was HIV positive and
this person, they showed them a picture that was either attractive or
unattractive and when showed the attractive person, they assumed that
this person received or had contracted HIV from heterosexual contact.
When showed the unattractive photo, they assume that the HIV positive
stranger had received HIV from a homosexual contact or via drug use.
Similarly essays by Cash & Trimer in 1984. If you put an attractive photo
with an essay, the essay gets a more positive evaluation than if you
have an unattractive photo paired with the essay.
Let’s move on to slide seven and learn even more about similarities. We
have two folk wisdom phrases that are often used; opposites attract versus
birds of a feather. What we do know is that couples tend to be similar
in physical attractiveness. Usually women are more attracted to their
male partners in heterosexual relationships. What happens when they are
dissimilar in appearance is people believe that they are actually less
satisfied in a relationship. However, there is a lot of evidence that
birds of a feather flock together. Being alike with regard
to smoking, drinking, premarital sex, morning/night people, similar
self-concepts, religion, traditional gender role endorsement, agreement
about what is funny all leads to more attractiveness.
Slide eight. Curtis & Miller in 1986 did a study called the we like to
be liked study. It explores expectancy confirmation. People are going to
engage in a conversation with a confederate. They were either told that
the confederate very much liked them or didn’t like them very much or
felt the mutual opinion. Those who were told that the person they were
able to talk to liked them, they then coded the verbal disclosure as
well as nonverbal, that the person who was the participant, not the
confederate, exhibited. What they found is that the participant who felt
that the person liked them made more expressions of similarity, agreed
more, engaged in more self-disclosure, behaved in a warmer manner towards
them, had more positive attitudes and resulted in more actual liking of the
confederate later than not. There are some exceptions. Individuals who
have negative self-concept, or what lay people might refer to as low
self-esteem, tend to like people who endorse that self-concept. This
means the typical pattern is someone’s low self-esteem ends up in a
relationship with someone who endorses that low self-esteem and confirms
the fact that they are in fact worthless in some extent. This leads to
a cyclical effect in which the person’s self-esteem never rises and
remains negative over time.
Let’s move on to slide nine. What about this looking alike business.
What we
know is long term couples and elderly couples resemble one another
physically, that is they tend to be mistaken for brother and sister. How
does this happen. All the more time that you spend with someone, the
more likely it is that you mirror or mimic their facial expressions.
This means that you often will have facial wrinkles and lines that
resemble your partners because you’ve spent more time with them
typically than with others. In addition, diet and physical exercise also
tend to be similar within couples, therefore the longer you’re together,
the more likely you are to begin to look like your partner to some
extent.
This concludes our attraction lecture, part one. Thank you.
