Psychology of Attraction

The study of attraction falls into the category of social psychology because the topic involves the behaviors of people and it’s impact on people in their communities and others and there are many factors, theories, and concepts that go into the idea of attraction and. These theories and concepts psychologists have developed help create a better understanding of why people are attracted to certain things because we are all individuals who have similar and different interests but the real question is to find out how and why these differences arise. So ideally in life the main concept affiliated with the idea of attraction is love in the sense that one day we will find that significant other to spend the rest of our lives with and every person has their own list of characteristics of traits that they are attracted too. They develop this list through experiences from an early age and as they grow up they are involved in more things and come to better realizations of themselves and the people around them. There are three primary factors psychologists take into consideration when addressing social psychology; the first factor is social influence or how our behaviors are impacted by people around us. This is a factor someone can easily figure out about themselves because you could just think about how the things you like or the friends you have impact the decisions you make. In a better example, you will do something or like things that your peers also like because it is trait you share among each other so it’ll make you feel comfortable which can tie into the other factors of social psychology. The second factor psychologists recognize is social cognition or the ways people think about each other which primarily deals with first impressions and the process of developing relationships. As I learned during my first year of college, in the book Blind Spot, the authors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald discuss the impacts if implicit and explicit bias’s which relates back to the factor of social cognition because as humans and individuals with different thought processes we are programmed to make predictions and assumptions of the people we surround ourselves with especially if we are meeting them for the first time. The last factor of the main three is social interaction which is referred to as the positive and negative aspects of people relating to one another. It can be how these three factors all relate to one another because they focus on behavior and actions of how people are around one another, how they act around people they consider as friends and how they interact with people they label as strangers.

Adding on another concept of social psychology that can be associated with the idea of attraction is that of social influence. Philosophers have determined that there are three types of social influences that play an important role in our lives and these types play a key role in decision making, conflict, expressing interests and opinions and how we want others to view ourselves. The three types are conformity, compliance, and obedience; conformity is the process or act in changing one’s own behavior to more closely match the actions of your own or others, in other words the tendency to act and think like the people around us. The idea of conformity could tie into the idea of attraction because you will be intrigued and likely to associate yourself with people who share similar beliefs and interests as you, if you conform to something it is because you have some type of similarity with that object, theory or person. Compliance is the process of getting people to change behavior as a result of another person or group asking or directing them to change and ideally this brought me to the idea of dating in relation to attraction. I mention dating because couples are likely to comply with one another in order to avoid arguments that could potentially hurt the relationship so in order to keep the relationship going they are likely more vulnerable to come to a conclusion in both of them change behaviors for the better outcome. Then we have obedience defined as the idea of changing one’s behavior at the command of an authority figure or an individuals compliance when given an order or command from someone in a position of authority. Again we could relate this type to dating and attraction as well because which couples like having a disobedient significant other? I’m pretty sure a ton will answer no to that question but then anything there comes a certain level or being obedient because when it comes to dating each other, the idea of one person dominating the other or having more authority will damage and hurt the relationship so there has to be compliance as well to avoid that possible conflict.

The pyramid above is a depiction of what author Jen Kim, graduate from Northwestern University, concluded to be what she believes are the four main factors of attraction. In her article she begins with explaining the bottom of the pyramid in areas of status and health and says that there are two different types of status; internal and external. Internal status can include traits such as confidence, skill set, and belief system while the external statuses include characteristics such as job, material possessions, and visual markers. Kim states “internal and external status are both important, although most people might argue that internal status, particularly confidence, is more attractive than external status in both the short and long term.” Although some traits may outweigh the others Kim ensures that all traits and characteristics she has listed all have impacts in the short and term of peoples lives because as we are aware of, societies are always changing and so are its standards in which people are vulnerable to comply to so this will intend impact what statuses are attractive or not. Next she goes into the area of health and claims that “Health is straightforward. It includes the way you look, the way you move, the way you smell, or your basic intelligence.” Then goes on to make a more general claim and gives the example of hygiene and normally we prefer people who smell good and not bad because it’s just something we constructed as a society to be attractive. So this all supports her case that health and hygiene are primary factors of being attractive based on evidence that supports the idea of society preferring people who take good care of themselves. The next area on the pyramid she begins to address is emotion and the area that impacts people the most when the idea of caring and loving someone else. Kim also says that there are 4 types of emotional connections; trust and comfort, emotional intelligence in terms of the ability to make others feel comfortable,
uniqueness or that one thing that makes us “us” and lastly uncertainty or the certain level of mystery we have when meeting someone. It is through this emotional stage that she claims to be the strongest and possibly more powerful factor because as emotional attachment continues to increase, emotion could overpower many other aspects of life that impact decision making. The last area on the pyramid is logic and Kim describes it as what separates humans from other mammals, it is how we use our minds to develop and analyze and also helps us ensure that the person we are talking to, attracted to, is practically aligned with us. After briefly describing her take on logic, she states that greater alignment means the possibility of being attracted to one another will be very high because it expresses similarities. Her theory and take and what is considered attracted by the majority of people is valid but to some extent because their is little explanation and actual data to support her claims. But their is no denying the fact that the impacts of status, health, emotion and logic are important in the process of what we consider to be attractive, they focus on the interactions and behaviors of people in our society which is the center focus of social psychology.

In other studies that revolve around the topic of attraction involve the concepts of proximity, reciprocity, similarity, and physical attractiveness because it is hypothetically interpreted that people will seek for those who share characteristics of the same appearance. But a concept that has yet to be discussed is proximity which states that people are more likely to become friends with people who are geographically closer to them and this makes absolute sense in many cases. For example, college students. Every year most first years are paired with random roommates living with other random people in a large dorm and eventually these people come become possible friends because you are around them every day. That presence will force conversation in some cases and through more interaction we become closer and attached to different people and perhaps future partners. The concepts of similarity and reciprocity have been mentioned already in the matters that people are likely to be attracted to those of the same age, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sex and many other socially constructed factors that play a vital role in our society. However although these are findings that psychologists believe to be true, we are all individuals who have our own ideas and opinions so there can never be one correct answer to attraction because we all like what we like as simple as one can put it.

Works Cited

John T. Jones, Brett W. Pelham and Mauricio Carvallo, Matthew C. Mirenberg. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Js: Implicit Egotism and Interpersonal Attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association 2004, Vol. 87, №5, 665– 683.

Clydre Hendrick, Steven R. Brown. Introversion, Extraversion, and Interpersonal Attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1971, Vol. 20, №1, 31–36

Nicholson, J. (2016, June 21). 3 Vital Elements of Attraction. Retrieved April, 2018, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-attraction-doctor/201606/3-vital-elements-attraction

Banaji, Mahzarin R. Blindspot : Hidden Biases of Good People. New York: Delacorte Press, 2013. Print.

R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba Textbook Series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF Publishers.

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