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Attraction and Rejection 1 Running Head: ATTRACTION AND REJECTION Attraction and Rejection Eli J. Finkel Northwestern University Roy F. Baumeister Florida State University June 21, 2018 Word count: 10,575 To appear in E. J. Finkel, and R. F. Baumeister (Eds.), Advanced social psychology: The state of the science. New York: Oxford University Press. Attraction and Rejection 2 Attraction and Rejection Human beings are social animals, and being social requires having relationships with others. We seek people to bond with, and we try to avoid rejection. But humans are more than just social—we are also cultural. Indeed, although other creatures, like ants and bees, are more social than humans, no other species is more cultural, nor even nearly as cultural, as we are (Baumeister, 2005). How do we, as social animals, leverage the opportunities afforded by our culture to help us meet our needs? We evolve and fine-tune sophisticated psychological machinery, including mind- reading skills and self-awareness, to determine with whom we would like to pursue a relationship (attraction) and to reduce the odds of rejection from our primary social groups (rejection). This chapter considers both of these social-psychological phenomena, starting with attraction. Attraction Historical Perspective Although theorizing on interpersonal attraction—the tendency to evaluate positively, and seek closeness with, a target person to whom we are not (yet) close—is millennia old, only a smattering of empirical investigations existed before the 1960s. Notable among them were studies on assortative mating (Harris, 1912), popularity (Moreno, 1934), power (Waller, 1938), mate preferences (Hill, 1945), sexuality (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948), and physical proximity (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950). Such studies set the stage for the development of an organized subdiscipline of interpersonal attraction within social psychology. This subdiscipline coalesced in the 1960s and 1970s. Theodore Newcomb (1961) and Donn Byrne (1961) launched it with landmark publications investigating whether similarity predicts attraction. Shortly thereafter, scholars studied a broad range of attraction-relevant topics, including the effects of a target’s physical attractiveness (Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966; Attraction and Rejection 3 Huston, 1973), the effects of a perceiver’s physiological arousal (Berscheid & Walster, 1974; Dutton & Aron, 1974), whether a target reciprocates liking from a perceiver (Walster, Walster, Piliavin, & Schmidt, 1973), whether a target who is “too perfect” is less likeable than an otherwise-identical target who has benign imperfections (Aronson, Willerman, & Floyd, 1966), and whether perceivers tend to be more attracted to a target who grows to like them over time than to a target who has liked them from the beginning (Aronson & Linder, 1965). Indeed, the empirical yield of attraction research was substantial enough to warrant a book, Interpersonal Attraction, which Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster published in 1969 and revised in 1978. Meanwhile, in the United States and other Western nations, the countercultural revolution was shattering long-held assumptions about gender roles and relationship dynamics, yielding skyrocketing divorce rates and widespread hand-wringing about the breakdown of traditional family life (Finkel, 2017). As a response, researchers across the social sciences redoubled their efforts to understand the contours of marriage and other long-term relationships, unearthing alarming findings regarding important topics like the rate of physical aggression within marriage (Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). Such developments altered social psychologists’ research priorities, strengthening their desire to understand what makes established relationships satisfying versus dissatisfying, stable versus unstable (Gable, this volume). As a result, starting in the 1980s, “the field of interpersonal attraction, as an organized literature, largely faded into the background, supplanted but not replaced by a field called ‘close relationships’” (Graziano & Bruce, 2008, p. 272; also see Berscheid, 1985; Reis, 2007). In the late 1980s and 1990s, a new, more evolutionarily grounded, approach to understanding interpersonal attraction emerged and gained prominence (Buss, 1989), filling the void left when the field of attraction research largely abdicated its perch within social psychology to close relationships research. The evolutionary approach leverages Darwin’s principles of natural and Attraction and Rejection 4 sexual selection (Maner & Kenrick, this volume) to derive novel hypotheses regarding when and how individuals experience attraction to a given target. In the twenty-first century, the broader field of interpersonal attraction has enjoyed a renaissance, surging alongside the still-robust field of evolutionary psychology. A major impetus behind this resurgence was the advent of technological and methodological developments in dating practices and social networking in the real world, including online dating, speed-dating, and social networking (Boyd & Ellison, 2008; Finkel & Eastwick, 2008; Finkel, Eastwick, Karney, Reis, & Sprecher, 2012). These technological developments have converged with the growth of evolutionary models to influence the types of attraction social psychologists study. In particular, although scholars have long investigated both romantic and nonromantic forms of attraction, the influence of online dating, speed-dating, and evolutionary perspectives have tilted the field increasingly toward romantic attraction in recent decades. The present chapter reflects that shift. Attraction Research Methods Social-psychological studies of close relationships typically involve the recruitment of research participants who are already involved in a close relationship—frequently a serious romantic relationship—and the studies address topics like how satisfying the relationship is and how likely it is to dissolve during a longitudinal follow-up period. Social-psychological studies of attraction, in contrast, typically involve the recruitment of research participants who report on a stranger, and the studies are about their attraction to him or her. Most such studies assess participants’ attraction to targets they have never met, or have just met for the first time. Some ask participants to report on a hypothetical partner, as when they report how important it is that a potential partner has a good sense of humor. Some ask participants to report on a specific target (or more than one), perhaps by showing them a photograph or profile of him or her. Although such studies enjoy high levels of experimental Attraction and Rejection 5 control, the extent to which the attraction-related processes they identify generalize to situations in which we actually meet a potential partner is often unknown. To address such concerns about generalizability while maintaining strong experimental control, scholars sometimes invest the resources required to introduce strangers to each other in a psychology laboratory or in another structured context. They might, for example, have participants interact with a research confederate. One influential method that seeks to maximize both external and internal validity is speed-dating (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008). In speed-dating studies, participants volunteer for an actual speed-dating event in which they meet around a dozen preferred-sex partners for interactions of, say, four minutes in duration. The value of speed-dating methods has come into especially sharp focus as concerns about replicability within social psychology have grown, because speed-dating events provide an efficient means of collecting high-impact data characterized by strong statistical power. For example, one study included eight heterosexual speed-dating events conducted over a three-day period, running 187 participants through a procedure that yielded more than 1,100 video-recorded speed-dates and 2,200 interaction-record questionnaires. Such data enable researchers to answer questions that are unanswerable with most methods, such as the extent to which David’s attraction to Kyoko is due to something about David (he’s attracted to all the women), something about Kyoko (all the men are attracted to her), or something about their unique chemistry (even after control for David’s attraction to the women in general and the men’s general attraction to Kyoko, he is uniquely attraction to her) (Joel, Eastwick, & Finkel, 2017; see Kenny and La Voie, 1984). When evaluating research methods, the most important consideration is the extent to which the methods are aligned with the research question. If a researcher wants to know what qualities people think they want in a hypothetical partner, simply asking participants what they want is sufficient. But if the researcher wants to know whether people exhibit greater attraction to partners Attraction and Rejection 6 who possess more of a given quality, the researcher is better served by observing how much attraction participants experience toward a real-life potential partner who possesses more versus less of that quality. Theory and Research on Attraction Recent methodological advances have emerged alongside notable, and desperately needed, theoretical advances. According to the original, 2010 version of this chapter, research on attraction is “a theoretical morass. Dozens of theories have guided research, and scholars have devoted little effort toward linking these far-flung theories into