Similarity Principle of Attraction

Similarity Leads to Attraction

Beginning with Aristotle's essay on friendship in 330 BCE, the idea that similarity increases interpersonal attraction has permeated our beliefs. Near the end of the 19th century, Sir Francis Galton provided empirical verification of this belief when he found that spouses were similar in many attributes. However, his findings could not address the cause-and-effect relation between similarity and attraction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Theodore Newcomb conducted one of the earliest studies examining the influence of similarity on attraction at the University of Michigan. He examined friendship formation among male housemates who were initially strangers. At first, men's friendships were influenced mostly by perceived similarity, but as the semester continued and the men learned more about their housemates, these friendships were influenced mostly by actual similarity. In both cases, however, higher similarity was associated with higher attraction. This research suggested that similarity leads to attraction, but the naturalistic setting and lack of experimental manipulation and control still raised questions about cause and effect.

To examine the cause-and-effect relation in the similarity-attraction hypothesis, Donn Byrne and his colleagues conducted a series of studies using the “bogus stranger paradigm.” In the bogus stranger paradigm, a participant is led to believe that there is [Page 1501]another individual in the study. However, the other individual does not actually exist—hence, the “bogus stranger.” In these types of studies, attitudi-nal similarity of the bogus stranger to the participant is experimentally manipulated to determine its effects on attraction. Attraction in these studies is typically measured by a question about how much the participant liked the stranger or how willing the participant would be to work with the stranger on a future task. These studies, then, asked whether an individual would be more likely to express a desire to work with an unknown stranger (attraction) the more similar the stranger's attitudes were to one's own attitudes (similarity). Supporting the cause-and-effect relation, individuals who were randomly assigned to the experimental condition in which the bogus other was presented as being similar to the individual were more attracted to the person than individuals who were randomly assigned to condition where the bogus other was presented as being dissimilar. These findings are robust, with the importance of similarity on attraction extending from interactions with strangers to marital relationships.

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