Interpersonal Attraction

Definition of Interpersonal Attraction

All these questions are answered by studying interpersonal attraction.

This includes platonic friendship as well as romantic love. Attraction is the positive emotion you feel towards someone, like when you get excited to hang out with a friend or nervous about going on a first date.

While we often think of having “types” when it comes to a romantic partner, there are also reasons why we gravitate towards certain people, even as friends. It’s not entirely based on physical appearance and personality (like romantic attraction is) but based more on convenience.

Fig. 1 Friends who experienced interpersonal attraction. pixabay.com.

Factors of Interpersonal Attraction

Although we can believe that we have free choice in who we become friends with, other interpersonal factors are involved. Just think about you playing a sport in middle and high school. You spent a lot of time with the people on that team and became friends with some of them. Maybe you have been best friends with your next-door neighbor since childhood. Perhaps you started taking a new class and became friends with the people there. But do you have any similarities with your neighbor? Would you be friends with the people on the team if you had met them otherwise? Do you have anything in common with your new friends from your class? If the answer is no to any of these questions, why are you friends with them? And more importantly, how did you even become friends with them?

Proximity

Studies have shown that police academy cadets tend to be friends with those whose last names are alphabetically close to theirs. Any thoughts on why?

Proximity! One of the most prominent factors of interpersonal attraction is the proximity you have with the person. In this case, proximity purely means physical proximity. The reason why the police officers are closest with people with similar last names is that they are organized in groups alphabetically. They sleep near those people, train with them, and through this constant proximity, they become friends. Do you have good friends who just so happen to be your neighbors? Or maybe if you’ve gone to a summer camp and you end up being close friends with the people you lived nearby? While part of that might be because you and your friends are socially compatible, another factor is the geographic proximity you share with them.

Repeated Exposure

Have you ever looked at an outfit and didn’t like it? And then looked at it again and still didn’t love it, but maybe you liked it just a little bit? And by the fifth time you looked at it, you realize it’s a great outfit? Or maybe the first time you listened to a song, you hated it, but the more times it came on the radio, the more you began to like it?

The more familiar we get with varying things – songs, clothes, school topics – the more we like them. That goes for people too. It has been shown that the more exposure you get to something (anything), the more you like it. A study has even shown that people like the letter E more than they do Q because we use the letter E much more. The reasoning behind this phenomenon is that when we continually get exposed to a stimulus, we become more familiar with it. This increasing familiarity leads us to like it more since we like things we are familiar with. It can be applied to interpersonal relationships as well. The reason why you gravitate towards a particular person could be because you are familiar with them through seeing them multiple times before. This familiarity causes you to be comfortable and feels favorable emotions towards them, leading to a friendship.

Similarities

“Opposites attract.”

Do they?

Although there are exceptions to every rule, social psychologists have declared that sharing similar traits is more important than sharing dissimilar ones. When we find out that we share some similarities with someone, we like them more. Why? Liking them, in essence, is complimenting yourself. When you like someone similar to you, you are saying that you like yourself – you remind me of myself, and I like myself; therefore, I should like you. In addition to liking someone to like ourselves, we also enjoy it when others like us. When someone you know likes you, there’s a greater chance that you’ll like them too because of the reciprocity of the liking effect (we like people who like us).

Physical Attractiveness

Physical attractiveness is a factor in determining interpersonal attraction. If we go back in time, people only looked for reproductive ability in partners. Although we have evolved, that reasoning can still be used for several physical features. People prefer a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio for women. One might say because people like the hourglass look, others claim that this is the ratio that maximizes fertility for women. People might say they want to date someone because they have a symmetrical face bilaterally. However, others would say that a symmetrical face means that someone is free of parasites.

Fig. 2 Photograph of a woman celebrating Diwali. pixabay.com.

Of course, it is all about the quality of friendships rather than the quantity. Just as studies have shown that people who are more conventionally physically attractive will have more friends initially, research has also shown that that factor decreases drastically when people get to know each other.

Example of Interpersonal Attraction

Even though there are instances of interpersonal attraction and relationships that do not fall into these criteria, this is most often why we have friendships with certain people. These factors play to our behavioral, affective, and cognitive systems.