Interpersonal Attraction 1
Running Head: INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION
Interpersonal Attraction: In Search of a Theoretical Rosetta Stone
Eli J. Finkel
Northwestern University
Paul W. Eastwick
Texas A&M University
Date: May 7, 2012
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Running Head: INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION
Interpersonal Attraction: In Search of a Theoretical Rosetta Stone
Eli J. Finkel Northwestern University
Paul W. Eastwick Texas A&M University
Date: May 7, 2012
Abstract This chapter reviews theory and research on interpersonal attraction, a literature that dates back more than half a century. Although this literature has produced a wealth of empirical data, it also has lacked theoretical coherence. The present chapter takes two significant steps toward the theoretical unification of this literature. First, it identifies three metatheoretical perspectives—the domain-general reward perspective, the domain-specific evolutionary perspective, and the attachment perspective—that collectively account for the large majority of research findings on interpersonal attraction, and it reviews the literature from within that metatheoretical structure. At their core, all three of these perspectives emphasize the needs people bring to attraction contexts. Second, it suggests that the instrumentality principle—that people become attracted to others to the degree that those others help them achieve goals that are currently high in motivational priority—is the core, unifying principle underlying interpersonal attraction. According to this principle, people also become less attracted to others who are instrumental for a certain goal once people have made substantial progress toward achieving that goal, because people tend to shift their emphasis to other goals at that point. Indeed, because people’s motivational priorities can fluctuate rapidly, their attraction to a given target person, and their rank ordering of attraction to others in their social network, will also fluctuate.
reviews, including those presented in the major textbooks in the field (e.g., Berscheid & Regan, 2005; Bradbury & Karney, 2010; Miller, 2012), organize the literature around the fundamental principles of attraction, such as familiarity, reciprocity, similarity, and the allure of physical attractiveness. Other reviews organize the literature around the key predictors of attraction (e.g., Finkel & Baumeister, 2010; Simpson & Harris, 1994; see Kelley et al., 1983), typically categorizing them as most relevant to (i) the actor (characteristics of the person who experiences attraction), (ii) the target (characteristics of the person to whom the actor is attracted), (iii) the relationship (characteristics of the dyad above and beyond actor and partner characteristics), or (iv) the environment (characteristics of the physical or social environment). Both of these organizational structures have value, but neither is especially theoretical. Our goal in the present chapter is to take a step toward the theoretical integration of the interpersonal attraction literature. We seek to do so in two ways. First, we suggest that almost all research on interpersonal attraction has been implicitly or explicitly guided by one of three overarching metatheoretical perspectives—domain-general reward perspectives, domain-specific evolutionary perspectives, and attachment perspectives—and we use this tripartite theoretical structure to review the attraction literature. Second, we argue that this literature coheres around a single core principle, the instrumentality principle , which suggests that people become attracted to others who help them achieve needs or goals that are currently high in motivational priority. Domain-general reward perspectives emphasize people’s fundamental needs (e.g., pleasure, belonging, self-esteem, consistency) that are relevant to diverse life domains (e.g., friendship, work, family, mating). In principle, people can satisfy these needs through diverse nonsocial and social means, including through romantic relationships. For example, people’s need to maintain a positive self-view can be satisfied by acing an exam (i.e., nonsocial means) or by receiving a compliment from a friend (i.e., nonromantic social means), and it can also be satisfied by a
spouse’s sexual overtures (i.e., romantic social means). In contrast, domain-specific evolutionary perspectives emphasize that people possess specific needs that were linked to reproductive success in humans’ ancestral past, and these specific needs can be met only through specific means. For example, people’s need to reproduce can be satisfied (in a long-term context) by their spouse exhibiting sexual attraction toward them, but not by having their friend compliment them or by acing an exam. Finally, attachment perspectives , which are still in their infancy vis-à-vis understanding interpersonal attraction, are built upon the idea that humans are motivated to approach attachment figures in times of distress in an attempt to reestablish a sense of security (Bowlby, 1969). Some elements of the attachment perspective are reminiscent of the domain- general perspective, such as the need for contact comfort, which applies in both parental and mating relationships (Harlow, 1958), yet other elements are reminiscent of the domain-specific perspective, such as the initiation of particular behavioral and physiological patterns (e.g., distress) in response to particular environmental cues (e.g., loss of an attachment figure; Sbarra & Hazan, 2008). Chronologically, the domain-general reward perspective has guided research since scholars began studying interpersonal attraction in the middle of the 20th^ century, the domain-specific evolutionary perspective came to prominence in the late 1980s, and the attachment perspective emerged in the early 1990s and has picked up steam over the past several years. Finally, after concluding our review of the attraction literature, we argue that the instrumentality principle can serve as the central, unifying principle for the interpersonal attraction literature—a theoretical Rosetta Stone. In building this argument, we offer a selective tour through classic and current perspectives on motivation and motivated cognition. In addition, we suggest that the instrumentality principle is more precise, more empirically tractable, more theoretically generative, and more integrative than the reward principle. Section I: A Review of the Interpersonal Attraction Literature
attraction effects scholars have identified since the 1950s. This extraction approach allows us to discuss disparate interpersonal attraction effects as fulfilling the same need. Pleasure. People tend to approach physical and psychological pleasure and avoid physical and psychological pain (Atkinson, 1964; Freud, 1920/1952; Gray, 1982; Thorndike, 1935). As applied to the attraction domain, people tend to approach others whom they associate with pleasure and avoid others whom they associate with pain (Byrne & Clore, 1974; Lott & Lott, 1974). Some interpersonal pleasures are normative in that they are enjoyed by all; for example, one of the two core dimensions of interpersonal interaction is warmth (Leary, 1957; Wiggins, 1979), and people generally find interactions with warm people to be pleasurable. However, the list of pleasures that people enjoy is, to some extent, also idiographic: “If you like to play piano duets, or tennis, you are apt to be rewarded by those who make it possible for you to do so” (Newcomb, 1956, p. 576). We illustrate the link from pleasure to attraction by discussing two normatively pleasurable factors—physical attractiveness and sense of humor—and the impact of secondary reinforcers. Others’ physical attractiveness is perhaps the single most robust predictor of people’s initial attraction to them (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008a; Feingold, 1990). In a seminal demonstration of this effect, college students attended a dance party with a randomly assigned partner they had not met previously (Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966). The major predictor of attraction was the target’s objectively coded physical attractiveness. Neural evidence speaks to the hedonic value of beholding beautiful people, demonstrating that reward circuitry in the brain (e.g., the nucleus accumbens) activates in response to viewing physically attractive faces (Aharon et al., 2001; Cloutier, Heatherton, Whalen, & Kelley, 2008; O’Doherty et al., 2003). As testimony to the domain-generality of this tendency, people tend to be especially attracted to physically attractive others even in platonic contexts (Feingold, 1990; Langlois et al., 2000), and even three-month-old babies prefer to gaze at the faces of attractive others (Langlois et al., 1987; Slater et al., 1998).
Furthermore, this robust tendency to be attracted to physically attractive others appears to be due, at least in part, to a general tendency to be attracted to beautiful, easy-to-process objects, both human and nonhuman (Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998). Moving beyond physical attractiveness, others’ sense of humor also predicts attraction to them, presumably because laughter and mirth are inherently pleasurable experiences. For example, a good sense of humor is among the most important qualities that both men and women seek in a potential romantic partner (Buss, 1988; Feingold, 1992). As testimony to the domain-generality of this desire for humor, people report that possessing a good sense of humor is a desirable quality not only in diverse romantic contexts (a casual sex partner, a dating partner, a marriage partner), but also in both same-sex and cross-sex friendships (Sprecher & Regan, 2002). In addition to qualities that are inherently pleasurable, scholars have also investigated qualities that provide for indirect access to pleasurable experiences and can consequently function as secondary reinforcers. One such example is a target’s status/resources (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008a; Fletcher, Simpson, Thomas, & Giles, 1999; Pérusse, 1993). For example, people tend to experience attraction to others who are, or who have the potential to be, wealthy or ambitious, presumably in part because interdependence with such others provides people with access to a lifestyle that offers elevated levels of hedonic pleasure. Self-esteem. Despite their undeniable enthusiasm for the pursuit of hedonic pleasure, people are much more than mere pleasure-seekers. For example, people also have a need to possess high self-esteem —to evaluate themselves positively—and many of the most powerful means for meeting this need involve interpersonal processes (M. R. Leary & Baumeister, 2000). We suggest that a broad range of interpersonal attraction effects are due, at least in part, to people’s desire to pursue or maintain high self-esteem. We discuss four such effects here.
especially attracted to partners who liked them more than those partners liked other people, but they were not attracted to partners who indiscriminately liked everybody (Eastwick, Finkel, Mochon, & Ariely, 2007; also see Eastwick & Finkel, 2009). Similarly, classic research suggests that people tend to be more attracted to others who grow to like them over time than to others who have always liked them, who have always disliked them, or who have grown to dislike them over time (Aronson & Linder, 1965). This effect appears to derive from the tendency for people to experience a self-esteem boost from having discerning others like them as they get to know them better. Indeed, people tend to be sufficiently eager for evidence that others like them that they even tend to be attracted to others who ingratiate themselves to win favor (Gordon, 1996; Vonk, 2002). A third attraction effect inspired, at least in part, by others helping one meet one’s self-esteem needs is the pratfall effect. People are more attracted to appealing others (but not to unappealing others) who have committed a pratfall, such as spilling coffee on themselves, than to appealing others who have not (Aronson, Willerman, & Floyd, 1966; see Deaux, 1972). The effect seems to occur because although people like appealing others, this attraction is bolstered to the degree that those others do not make them feel inferior by social comparison (Herbst, Gaertner, & Insko, 2003). A fourth attraction effect inspired, at least in part, by others’ ability to meet a person’s self- esteem needs is the tendency for people with a low comparison level , relative to people with a high comparison level, to experience stronger attraction toward others. People who are dispositionally low in self-esteem or high in attachment anxiety, or who have recently been primed to have relatively low romantic expectations, tend to experience greater attraction to specific targets in part because their standards for receiving an ego boost from romantic involvement are lower. In accordance with this perspective, physically unattractive (vs. attractive) people not only tend to have lower standards for a potential partner (Buss & Shackelford, 2008), but they also tend to
view particular potential partners as more attractive (Montoya, 2008; but see Lee, Loewenstein, Ariely, Hong, & Young, 2008). Similarly, relative to people whose comparison standards have been temporarily raised, people whose comparison standards have not been altered tend to view others as more attractive. For example, male participants rated a target female as less attractive after watching a television show that depicted gorgeous women than after watching a television show that did not (Kenrick & Gutierres, 1980), and men who had just viewed Playboy centerfolds rated their wife as less attractive than did men looking at magazines that did not depict beautiful women (Kenrick, Gutierres, & Goldberg, 1989). Belonging. A third major need that people can meet through social processes is belonging. We focus on three classic attraction effects that appear to be driven, at least in part, by helping people satisfy their need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995): familiarity, self-disclosure, and the social basis of anxiety-reduction. First, people tend to be more attracted to others who are familiar to them than to others who are not. For example, people tend to become attracted to others who live in close physical proximity to them. In one classic study, people were about twice as likely to become close friends with somebody who lived next door to them (~20 feet away) than to somebody who lived two doors down (~40 feet away) (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950). This effect has been replicated many times (e.g., Segal, 1974), including in initial attraction contexts (Back, Schmulke, & Egloff, 2008; Reis, Maniaci, Caprariello, Eastwick, & Finkel, 2011a). To be sure, elevated familiarity can sometimes undermine liking (e.g., Ebbeson, Kjos, & Konečni, 1976), but those cases appear to result from the complexities of elevated interdependence rather than from familiarity per se (Reis, Maniaci, Caprariello, Eastwick, & Finkel, 2011b). Additional evidence in support of the attraction-promoting effects of familiarity comes from research on the mere exposure effect, which suggests that people tend to experience greater attraction to familiar stimuli, including familiar people, than to unfamiliar stimuli (Zajonc, 1968,
them manage that anxiety. In a classic series of studies, for example, women who believed that they would soon endure a stressful experience preferred to wait with another person who was also awaiting that experience rather than wait by themselves, presumably because pursuing social contact with that person would help to assuage their anxiety (Schachter, 1959; also see Rofé, 1984; Shaver & Klinnert, 1982). Consistency. A fourth major need that people frequently seek to meet through interpersonal relationships is consistency , defined in terms of people’s motivation to believe that their thoughts and behaviors are internally coherent. An early line of research sought to predict interpersonal attraction by building upon Heider’s (1958) suggestion that people seek consistency, or balance , in their evaluations and associations. In an influential study (Aronson & Cope, 1968), participants tended to be especially attracted to another person who had punished their enemies and rewarded their friends. This effect could not be explained by participants’ beliefs that the other person was similar to them, was trying to help or curry favor with them, or could potentially develop some sort of relationship with them in the future. In another example of the importance of consistency, people often look to others for self-verification —that is, for feedback that their views of themselves (positive or negative) are accurate, even when doing so causes them distress (Swann, 1983). Another influential program of research has demonstrated that people not only seek internal consistency—consistent cognitions and self-assessments—but also consistency between the norms they desire for a given relationship and the norms the other person displays. In particular, research on exchange and communal norms demonstrates that people tend to be especially attracted to others who immediately reciprocate benefits and favors when people desire exchange norms, which are built upon principles of reciprocity. In contrast, they tend to be especially attracted to
others who do not immediately reciprocate benefits when they desire communal norms, which are built upon principles of responsiveness to needs (Clark & Mills, 1979). Self-expansion. A fifth need that people frequently seek to meet through interpersonal relationships is the need for self-expansion. According to self-expansion theory, people are fundamentally motivated to expand their potential efficacy, and one important means by which they do so is through social relationships (Aron, Lewandowski, Mashek, & Aron, in press). People sometimes view themselves as having some degree of ownership over others’ resources, perspectives, and identities—the so-called inclusion-of-the-other-in-the-self principle (Aron et al., in press). For example, participants in one study who expected to initiate a new same-sex relationship preferred somebody whom they believed possessed dissimilar interests, presumably because the dissimilarity would provide an opportunity for self-expansion (Aron, Steele, Kashdan, & Perez, 2006). The incidental association of others with successful goal pursuit. Before concluding our discussion of domain-general reward approaches to understanding interpersonal attraction, we discuss one final issue pertaining to this topic: Incidentally associating others with rewards can promote attraction to them, even when those others have not played any causal role in the presence of the rewards. In a seminal study, grade-school children played a novel game in same-sex groups of three (Lott & Lott, 1960). The experimenter randomly assigned each member of each group either to succeed or to fail in the game. Subsequently, in an unrelated context, the children chose two classmates to join them on a hypothetical vacation to outer space. Children who had (vs. had not) succeeded at the game were almost four times more likely to choose a member of their play- group to join them (23% vs. 6% likelihood). In another classic study, participants in a comfortable room experienced significantly stronger attraction to an anonymous stranger than did participants in an uncomfortably hot and humid room (Griffitt, 1970; also see Griffitt & Veitch, 1971; May &
Dominant evolutionary approaches to human attraction challenge the idea that theoretically generative explanations for attraction phenomena can be achieved with appeals to domain-general needs (Buss, 1992; Buss & Reeve, 2003; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The evolutionary psychological perspective on mating came into prominence in the late 1980s on the heels of three major developments in evolutionary theory. Three major developments that led to the emergence of the evolutionary psychology of interpersonal attraction. The first development was the application of the concept of adaptation to human behavior. An adaptation is a feature of an organism that arose through natural selection because of its contributions to the organism’s reproductive success (Buss, Haselton, Shackelford, Bleske, & Wakefield, 1998). Although adaptation had been an essential element of evolutionary biology even before Darwin’s (1859) theory of natural selection achieved widespread acclaim, it was not until the publication of Wilson’s (1975) Sociobiology that scholars widely began to use the adaptation concept as a tool to explain human behavior. Wilson applied to Homo sapiens the same adaptive logic that had long been applied to animal morphology and behavior; that is, natural selection should have fashioned human behaviors in a manner that promotes reproductive success across a variety of life domains (e.g., altruism, aggression, mating; see also Wilson, 1979). Thus, if human mating behaviors were shaped by natural selection, scholars could use evolutionary concepts to understand and predict how humans navigate the mating domain. The second development was the publication of Trivers’ (1972) theory of differential parental investment. Trivers noted that females invest more resources in offspring than males do in most animal species (including Homo sapiens ), and he hypothesized that this difference was the engine that drove sexual selection. When females invest considerably more in offspring than males do, the costs of a poor mating decision for females are especially high, so they should be especially discriminating among sex partners. Under these circumstances, males should compete vigorously
for sexual access to many females, as males’ reproductive success is limited only by the number of partners they can acquire. Among animals where the sex difference in parental investment is smaller (e.g., monogamous birds), sex differences in mating behaviors should be smaller. The third development was the concept of domain-specificity. Domain-specificity , when applied to the mind, refers to the idea that a mental system incorporates specific classes of information in the service of a specific functional outcome (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006). For example, a domain-specific module in the mind of a human male might respond to the presence of a sexual cue (e.g., an attractive young female) by increasing his sexual desire and motivating sexual solicitations; the module would not facilitate these responses to the myriad mating- irrelevant cues that he encounters. Cosmides and Tooby integrated the concept of domain- specificity with the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology in their studies of social exchange (Cosmides, 1985, 1989; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Their studies revealed that participants were much better at solving logic problems when the instructions framed the problems in terms of “cheater detection” rather than generic “if–then” reasoning. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) suggested that this content effect reflected domain-specific, specialized mechanisms in the mind of Homo sapiens that had been designed by natural selection to solve the specific problem of cheater detection, not generic logic problems. Broadly speaking, these scholars surmised that natural selection would have fashioned the human psyche to consist largely of domain-specific mechanisms, because such a design would have been more efficient and effective than a design consisting largely of content-independent learning or reasoning mechanisms. First-generation findings from the evolutionary psychology of interpersonal attraction. These three developments laid the foundation for the evolutionary psychological perspective on mating. By the mid-to-late 1980s, there was a precedent for the application of adaptationist principles to humans (Wilson, 1975), and there was a strong theoretical basis for predicting that
past and that the survival of women and their offspring had been especially dependent upon gaining access to such resources, Buss hypothesized that women should be more likely than men to seek characteristics associated with resource acquisition in a mate. Consistent with this hypothesis, relative to men’s preferences in a mate, women valued good financial prospects significantly more in 36 of the 37 samples (with no significant reversals), they valued ambition and industriousness significantly more in 29 of the 37 samples (with one significant reversal), and they valued having a mate older than themselves in all 37 samples (see also Kenrick & Keefe, 1990). Second, based on the idea that that men’s reproductive success is constrained by challenges associated with gaining sexual access to fertile women, Buss hypothesized that men should be more likely than women to seek reproductive capacity in a mate. Consistent with this hypothesis, relative to women’s preferences in a mate, men valued physical attractiveness significantly more in 34 of the 37 samples (with no significant reversals), and they valued having a mate younger than themselves in all 37 samples. Third, based on the fact that men can never be 100% certain that they are the parent of a given child (in contrast to women’s 100% certainty) and are thus susceptible to cuckoldry, Buss hypothesized that men should be more likely than women to seek characteristics related to sexual chastity in a mate. Consistent with this hypothesis, relative to women’s preferences in a mate, men valued chastity, defined as having had no previous sexual partners, significantly more in 23 of the 37 samples (with no significant reversals). Various scholars have found such sex differences in representative samples within the United States (Sprecher, Sullivan, & Hatfield, 1994), in participants’ evaluations of photographs or descriptions of opposite-sex individuals (e.g., Townsend & Wasserman, 1998), and in early meta- analyses of the existing mate preferences literature (Feingold, 1990, 1992). These findings are consistent with Trivers’ (1972) logic, with women desiring earning prospects, ambition, and age in a mate because such traits suggest that a man can acquire and provide resources, and with men
desiring physical attractiveness and youth in a mate because such traits suggest that a woman is fertile. Short-term versus long-term mating strategies. In the early 1990s, Buss teamed up with David Schmitt to build a broader theoretical framework, sexual strategies theory , for understanding the evolutionary psychology of human mating (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). Sexual strategies theory is predicated on four premises: (a) “In human evolutionary history, both men and women have pursued short-term and long-term matings under certain conditions where the reproductive benefits have outweighed the costs”; (b) “different adaptive problems must be solved when pursuing a short-term sexual strategy as opposed to pursuing a long-term sexual strategy”; (c) “because of a fundamental asymmetry between the sexes in minimum levels of parental investment, men devote a larger proportion of their total mating effort to short-term mating than do women”; and (d) “because the reproductive opportunities and reproductive constraints differ for men and women in these two contexts, the adaptive problems that women must solve when pursuing each strategy are different from those that men must solve, although some problems are common to both sexes” (p. 205). According to this theory, men have historically been constrained in their reproductive success by the challenge of procuring sexual access to fertile women, whereas women have historically been constrained by the challenge of procuring access to resources for themselves and their offspring (“and perhaps secondarily by the quality of the man’s genes”; Buss & Schmitt, 1993, p. 206). Consequently, men and women developed divergent short- term and long-term mating strategies, with strategies defined as “evolved solutions to adaptive problems, with no consciousness or awareness on the part of the strategist implied” (p. 206). Buss and Schmitt (1993) garnered extensive support for core predictions of sexual strategies theory. For example, men tend to report greater interest in short-term mating than women do, but the sexes report comparable levels of interest in long-term mating. In addition, men tend to desire