Relationships and Attraction

Accounting for Taste: the effects of familiarity and similarity on attraction

-

Preference for the familiar

o People prefer commonly occurring letters compared to rarely occurring letters
o Mice prefer previously heard composers
o As people in one study demonstrated people find a room more familiar and
attractive the more times that they visit it when rating it
Why?
o Classical Conditioning: Exposure to a stimulus in the absence of aversive
outcomes conditions an individual to perceive the stimulus as safe
o Perceptual fluency: Increased exposure makes it easier to perceive a stimulus and
research shows that we prefer easy to perceive stimuli over difficult to perceive
stimuli

Preference for Similarity

-

Majority of U.S. married couples similar in race, religion, age, SES, education, IQ,
height, eye color, and physical attractiveness
Dating couples who were more similar on variety of dimensions were more likely to be
together 1 yr. later
Married couples with more similar personalities reported more closeness, shared
enjoyment of daily activities, marital satisfaction and less conflict

Implicit Egotism
-

Positive attitudes toward self spill over to affect attitudes towards things associated with
oneself
Name-letter effect: people prefer letters in own names
Birthday-numeral effect: people prefer numerals in own birthdays
2000 presidential election: those whose last intial was B were more likely to contribute
$ to Bush, those who last initial was G were more likely to contribute to Gore

Motivated Self-Enhancement
-

Male partcipants read and responsed to personal ads allegedly written by college-age
women
Threat manipulation
o Threat condition: Participants described their own biggest drawback as a dating
partner

o No threat condition: Participants described the typical mans biggest drawback as

a dating partner
Surname resemblance condition:
o High resemblance: The personal ad writers online name included first 3 letters of
participants own name (e.g. Participant named Larry Murray reads ad written by
STACEY_MURPHY)
o Low resemblance: The personal ad writers online name did not include first 3
letters of participants own name (e.g. Participant named Jason Gabriel reads ad
written by STACEY_MURPHY)
Participants rated their liking of the ad writer on a number of dimensions

Familiarity Revisited
-

Decades of research shows that increased exposure without any new information
increases liking for a person or object
However, in everyday life increased exposure often includes acquiring new information
about a person
When increased familiarity involves increased information about a person how does it
typically affect attitudes?

The familiarity breeds contempt hypothesis

-

First impressions are biased to be positive because when there is not much information
people tend to egocentrically project their own traits onto the target which leads to an
illusion of similarity
As more information is acquired people will encounter unambiguous evidence of
dissimilarities between the self and the other
Once dissimilarities are noticed they have a strong impact by biasing interpretations of
subsequent information leading people to perceive further dissimilarity between self and
other (dissimilarity cascade)

Suggestive evidence that familiarity breed contempt

-

Friendship: College students randomly assigned to be roommates tend to like each other
less over time living together
Marriage: 48% of couples who married in the 1970s divorced within 25 years
Politics: 10 out of 11 US presidents from H.S. Truman to G.W. Bush left office with
higher disapproval than they entered with
o e.g., Trumans disapproval increased from 5% to 65%, G.W. Bushs disapproval
increased from 25% to 60%
Users of an online dating website were surveyed about their perceptions of someone
whom they had already dated or whom they were about to go on a date with
Participants were asked to rate
o How much they knew about their dates hobbies/interests, family, occupation, and
social life

o How similar their date was to themselves

o How much they liked this person
Researchers compiled a list of 218 different traits that a previous sample of survey
respondents had listed when asked to describe themselves
A new sample of participants were recruited through an online dating website
Participants were shown between 1 and 10 traits that were randomly selected from the list
of 218 traits and they were told that the traits described a target individual
Participants were asked to indicate how many of the traits they shared with the target and
how much they liked the target