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Interpersonal Attraction: Liking And Loving Can the formation of a friendship be predicted? Can love be analyzed scientifically? To a psychologist, questions about liking and loving are simply that: questions that can be addressed using the tools of psychological research. Liking
A fundamental aspect of our relationships with other people is how favorably we regard them, that is, how much we like them. The amount of attraction or positive feeling we have for an individual will determine whether we befriend them, work with them, help them, or hurt them. Social psychologists have determined that several factors are influential in determining the degree of attraction we feel for another person. Proximity
If you are "out of sight," are you "out of mind"?
If you are like most people, the odds are 50/50 that your "one
true love" will live within walking distance of your home
<REF>(Clarke, 1952). Generally Why does proximity matter? There could be many reasons, including simply having more opportunity to get to know the other person. An intriguing idea advanced by social psychologist Robert Zajonc, however, is that repeated exposure to almost anything, including other people, will lead to increased liking. Research has tended to support this notion, sometimes called the mere exposure effect <glossary term>. Literally hundreds of studies have shown that repeated exposure tends to increase liking for the object <REF>(Bornstein, 1989). <REF>Zajonc (1968), for example, asked volunteers to look at a large number of photographs of people and indicate how much they liked them. Some of the photographs were presented many times, while others were shown less frequently. Individuals whose pictures were seen more often were rated as being more likable than individuals who were only seen a few times. This may partly explain why the more we see politicians on television, the more likely we are to vote for them <REF>(Grush, 1980). |
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speaking, your friends will tend to live near you, at school you
will make friends with students who are in your classes, and at
work the co-workers that you are closest to will tend to be from
the same office. <REF>Mady Segal (1974) noted an interesting
example of this phenomenon while studying friendships among Maryland
State Police trainees. After six months of classes at the police
academy, the police trainees were asked to identify their three
closest friends at the academy. Friends nominated by the trainees
tended to have last names starting with the same letter of the
alphabet as the trainee. Segal realized that since the trainees
were assigned to seats in their classrooms alphabetically, they
would of course spend more time in close proximity to students
with similar names. Close classroom seating turned out to be a
better predictor of friendship than a trainee's religion, hobbies,
age, or marital status.