Attraction

Definition

Attraction, to a social psychologist, is any force that draws people together. Social psychologists have traditionally used the term attraction to refer to the affinity that draws together friends and romantic partners. However, many current researchers believe there are important qualitative differences among the forces that draw people into different types of relationships.

History

Perhaps the most influential model of interpersonal attraction was the reinforcement-affect model. According to this model, attraction between people follows simple principles of classical conditioning, or associative learning. A person will come to like anyone associated with positive feelings (e.g., the waitress in a favorite restaurant) and dislike anyone associated with negative feelings (the traffic cop who writes the person a ticket for taking an illegal left turn). A corollary of this model is that the higher the ratio of positive to negative associations one has in a relationship with another person, the more he or she will like that person. In other words, a person will like the person who has provided him or her with three rewards and one [Page 71]punishment (for a ratio of .75 rewards) more than the person who provides him or her with six rewards and four punishments (yielding a lower overall ratio of .60, despite the higher total number of rewards). This corollary was studied by exposing research participants to other people who varied in their attitudinal similarity (on the assumption that meeting others who agree with them is rewarding).

Later research suggested a slight problem with this model, in that people generally tend to assume other people agree with them. Hence, the reward value of similarity is less than the punishment value of dissimilarity. Indeed, discovering that another person disagrees with one's important values does seem to be particularly unpleasant, and people tend to dislike those who disagree with them (particularly when those disagreeing people are members of their own groups, who they are particularly likely to expect to be similar).

The reinforcement-affect theory is an example of a domain-general model of behavior. Domain-general models attempt to explain a wide range of behavior using one simple principle. In this case, the simple and general principle is this: People, like other animals, will repeat behaviors that are rewarding and will not repeat behaviors that are not rewarding. Another domaingeneral model attempts to explain attraction by referencing broad principles of social exchange. Social exchange theories presume that people are implicitly driven by economic principles: People choose behaviors that they expect to maximize their future benefits and minimize their future costs. This model differs from a reinforcement-affect model in presuming that people do not simply respond passively to past rewards and punishments, but instead make mental calculations, including estimations of who is likely to be a good bargain in a future relationship. For example, you might pursue a relationship with someone who has never rewarded you in the past, and in fact you might even be willing to pay some initial costs to meet that person, if you have knowledge that they might make a good friend or mate. On the other side, you might pass on a potential mate who has been very pleasant to you if you estimate that you could get a better deal with someone else. Some variants of social exchange models presume that people are uncomfortable with any relationship that is an unfair bargain, whether they are underbenefitted (getting less than they deserve) or overbenefitted (getting more than they deserve).

...