Affinity Seeking

There is a long history of research looking at what makes people find others socially attractive—what makes people like each other. For many years, most predictors of attraction or affinity were static variables such as attitude similarity, proximity, and appearance. Thus, in Donn Byrne's work, people were given the presumed attitudes of a target person and then asked to indicate how attractive they found the target. In research on propinquity, scholars examined how closely people [Page 57]lived or worked with one another and then correlated those distances to attraction.

The affinity-seeking construct, developed by Robert Bell and John Daly, offered a more integrative, active approach to this body of literature. Early research on the construct had two primary themes. The first was a presumption that people engage in specific, active, and planned behaviors to get others to like them. So the construct suggested that people seeking affinity with others would, for example, intentionally find and suggest things they had in common with others, would physically move closer to people they were attracted to, and would actively change their physical appearance to make themselves more attractive. The second theme involved cataloging the primary strategies people use when actively seeking affinity. To do that required a conceptual model that highlighted four components of affinity-seeking: (1) antecedent factors (such as the goals involved in seeking affinity—to persuade, to generate liking), (2) constraints (variables that might affect affinity-seeking attempts such as personality, social skills, and context), (3) affinity moves (specific affinity-seeking strategies), and (4) responses (reactions of the target such as ignoring and/or rejecting the attempt).

The bulk of the academic work done on the construct focuses on the third component—specific affinity moves people make when attempting to generate positive interpersonal reactions. Bell and Daly discovered 25 different strategies that fell into seven clusters: (1) control and visibility (e.g., being interesting and dynamic), (2) trust (e.g., demonstrating openness and trustworthiness), (3) politeness (e.g., letting the other have control over the conversation, following conversational norms), (4) concern and caring (e.g., supporting the other's sense of who he or she is, acting attentive and listening), (5) other-involvement (e.g., incorporating the other into the exchange, nonverbal immediacy), (6) self-involvement (e.g., showing a sense of closeness with the other, including oneself in the conversation), and (7) commonalities (e.g., emphasizing similarities with target, assuming equality). A cluster analysis of the 25 strategies found they fell along three continua: (1) active-passive (being dynamic vs. listening), (2) aggressive–nonaggressive (manipulating attractiveness vs. supportiveness), and (3) self-other orientation (taking control versus including other).

The affinity-seeking construct spawned a number of lines of research including work on affinity-maintenance in married couples, affinity-seeking skills (conceived of as an individual difference), and the correlates of affinity-seeking.