Psychology Social Psychology Attraction, Obedience and Authority
To view other notes of Psychology Click Here.
Attraction
Interpersonal attraction refers to positive feelings about another person. It can take many forms, including liking, love, friendship, lust, and admiration.
Influences
Many factors influence whom people are attracted to. They include physical attractiveness, proximity, similarity, and reciprocity:
- Physical attractiveness: Research shows that romantic attraction is primarily determined by physical attractiveness. In the early stages of dating, people are more attracted to partners whom they consider to be physically attractive. Men are more likely to value physical attractiveness than are women.
- People’s perception of their own physical attractiveness also plays a role in romantic love. The matching hypothesis proposes that people tend to pick partners who are about equal in level of attractiveness to themselves.
- Proximity: People are more likely to become friends with people who are geographically close. One explanation for this is the mere exposure effect. The mere exposure effect refers to people’s tendency to like novel stimuli more if they encounter them repeatedly.
- Similarity: People also tend to pick partners who are similar to themselves in characteristics such as age, race, religion, social class, personality, education, intelligence, and attitude.
- This similarity is seen not only between romantic partners but also between friends. Some researchers have suggested that similarity causes attraction. Others acknowledge that people may be more likely to have friends and partners who are similar to themselves simply because of accessibility: people are more likely to associate with people who are similar to themselves.
- Reciprocity: People tend to like others who reciprocate their liking.
Romantic Love
Many researchers focus on one particular form of attraction: romantic love.
Kinds of Romantic Love
Researchers have proposed that romantic love includes two kinds of love: passionate love and compassionate love. These two kinds of love may occur together, but they do not always go hand in hand in a relationship:
- Passionate love: Involves absorption in another person, sexual desire, tenderness, and intense emotion.
- Compassionate love: Involves warmth, trust, and tolerance of another person. Compassionate love is sometimes considered to have two components: intimacy and commitment. Intimacy is the warm, close, sharing aspect of a relationship. Commitment is the intent to continue the relationship even in the face of difficulties. Researchers believe commitment is a good predictor of the stability of a relationship.
Attachment Styles
Some researchers study the influence of childhood attachment styles on adult relationships. Many researchers believe that as adults, people relate to their partners in the same way that they related to their caretakers in infancy. (See Chapter 4 for more information on attachment styles.)
Cultural Similarities and Differences
There are both similarities and differences among cultures in romantic attraction. Researchers have found that people in many different cultures place a high value on mutual attraction between partners and the kindness, intelligence, emotional stability, dependability, and good health of partners.
However, people in different cultures place a different value on romantic love within a marriage. People in individualistic cultures often believe romantic love is a prerequisite for marriage. In many collectivist cultures, people often consider it acceptable for family members or third parties to arrange marriages.
Evolutionary Perspectives
Evolutionary psychologists speculate that the tendency to be attracted to physically attractive people is adaptive. Many cultures value particular aspects of physical attractiveness, such as facial symmetry and a small waist-to-hip ratio. Evolutionary psychologists point out that facial symmetry can be an indicator of good health, since many developmental abnormalities tend to produce facial asymmetries. A small waist-to-hip ratio, which produces an “hourglass” figure, indicates high reproductive potential.
As predicted by the parental investment theory described in Chapters 2 and 12, men tend to be more interested in their partners’ youthfulness and physical attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists think that this is because these characteristics indicate that women will be able to reproduce successfully. Women, on the other hand, tend to value partners’ social status, wealth, and ambition, because these are characteristics of men who can successfully provide for offspring.
Obedience and Authority
Obedience is compliance with commands given by an authority figure. In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures.
Milgram’s Obedience Study
Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached.
Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered.
Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner. However, Milgram found that two-thirds of the teachers did administer even the highest level of shock, despite believing that the learner was suffering great pain and distress. Milgram believed that the teachers had acted in this way because they were pressured to do so by an authority figure.
Factors That Increase Obedience
Milgram found that subjects were more likely to obey in some circumstances than others. Obedience was highest when:
- Commands were given by an authority figure rather than another volunteer
- The experiments were done at a prestigious institution
- The authority figure was present in the room with the subject
- The learner was in another room
- The subject did not see other subjects disobeying commands
In everyday situations, people obey orders because they want to get rewards, because they want to avoid the negative consequences of disobeying, and because they believe an authority is legitimate. In more extreme situations, people obey even when they are required to violate their own values or commit crimes. Researchers think several factors cause people to carry obedience to extremes:
- People justify their behavior by assigning responsibility to the authority rather than themselves.
- People define the behavior that’s expected of them as routine.
- People don’t want to be rude or offend the authority.
- People obey easy commands first and then feel compelled to obey more and more difficult commands. This process is called entrapment, and it illustrates the foot-in-the-door phenomenon.
