Attractiveness

The Influence of Fleeting Attraction

Compliance to a simple request can be doubled by the most innocent manipulation.

There’s little doubt that friends are easier to persuade than strangers. That emotional connection and shared history is often enough to get the poor wretches doing things they’d rather avoid, like helping us move home.

Forgive the mercenary language, but friendship is a fantastic lever for persuasion and influence, a lever we happily push on every day.

But how much does someone have to like us before we can start to influence them? And, more to the point, can only the most fleeting attraction help us persuade them to comply with a request?

Mere similarity

Jerry Burger and colleagues at Santa Clara University used a sneaky experimental set-up to test this out (Burger et al., 2001). On arrival at the lab, participants were told the study was about first impressions and were asked to choose 20 adjectives which best described them from a list of 50 supplied.

The idea, they were told, was that they would swap lists with another participant in the experiment, then fill out some more questionnaires. After which, experiment over; back to the student bar. In fact the real test was coming.

The 20 adjectives from the ‘other person’ weren’t really from another person, it was part of the experimental manipulation. By varying the number of adjectives the ‘other person’ had ticked, the researchers were dividing participants into three groups:

Similar: this group thought the other person had ticked 17 of the same adjectives.
Neutral: 10 adjectives matched.
Dissimilar: had only ticked 3 of the same adjectives.

The experimenters were manipulating liking between participants and the ‘other person’ by using what psychologists call the ‘mere similarity’ effect. This is people’s tendency to like others more because of some slight similarity with themselves. It could be a friend in common or something as trivial as their names starting with the same letter.

So, when participants left the lab, what a surprise, the person they thought they had been exchanging self-descriptive adjectives with just happened to be walking down the corridor with them.

Then the moment of truth. In passing the participant was asked for a favour: would they mind reading an 8-page essay and providing a page of feedback?

Compliance doubled

Even this seemingly trivial manipulation of adjectives-in-common had a measurable effect. People who thought they were dissimilar only complied with the request 43% of the time. This went up to 60% in the neutral condition. But in the similar condition, compliance went up to an impressive 77%, almost double the dissimilar condition.

The experimenters also did the same experiment in a couple of other ways but reached the same conclusion. Whether the fleeting attraction was caused by choosing the same adjectives or sitting together silently for a couple of minutes, it was enough to double compliance to a request.

This experiment suggests that fleeting attraction can be remarkably powerful in changing ‘no’ into ‘yes’. We process relatively small requests in an automatic way, using simple rules-of-thumb. When asked for a small favour by a stranger, we make a snap judgement on how much we like them based on trivial information, and this can have a huge influence on our response.

Image credit: Derek

Facebook: 7 Highly Effective Habits

Quick 7-point primer on the psychology of Facebook.

Love it or loathe it, Facebook is everywhere, and will continue to be everywhere as the film describing its genesis—The Social Network—is released worldwide over coming months.

To help you cope, here are 7 research-based tips for total Facebook domination. If you don’t use it, these should at least help you pepper Facebook-related conversations with compelling observations from the psychological research.

1. Get between 100 and 300 friends

It doesn’t look good to have too many Facebook friends, or too few.

It has been suggested that humans can maintain relationships with 150 people and Tong et al. (2008) found Facebooker’s social attractiveness peaked at around this number. Go much above 300 or below 100 and social attractiveness starts to drop.

2. Court attractive friends

Make sure your friends, or the people who post on your ‘wall’, are good-looking. Walther et al. (2008) found that attractive friends boosted the perceived attractiveness of participant’s profiles.

Keep the uggos away, unlike the offline world, it won’t make you look better in comparison.

3. Understand the 7 motivations

If you need to lure more people in as Facebook friends, it’s handy to understand its attraction.

Joinson (2008) found 7 basic motivations for using Facebook: connecting with old or distant friends, social surveillance (see what old friends are up to, but without talking to them), looking up people met offline, virtual people watching, status updating and content.

4. Don’t let your partner use Facebook

Muise et al. (2009) found that participants who spent more time on Facebook were more jealous of their partners. This is probably because they are finding out things about their partner—who they know and where they’ve been—which, in the days before social networking, could have been kept quiet.

So, don’t let your partner see your Facebook profile. Unless you want them to be jealous. In which case, carry on.

5. Guard your privacy

Privacy is a big, controversial topic on Facebook because many people’s social networking profiles do say too much.

Nosko et al. (2010) found that young, single people were particularly likely to disclose sensitive information about themselves. It’s the online disinhibition effect writ large. But, according to Boyd (2010), more young people are using the privacy settings than a year ago, so the message is getting through.

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: watch what you say about yourself online, you never know who’s taking notes.

6. Display your real self

Remarkably, you can often trust Facebook profiles; Back et al., (2010) found that Facebook profiles generally reflected their owner’s actual rather than idealised selves.

Facebook users may not personally know all their Facebook friends but they probably do like the movies, books and bands they claim to like.

7. Use Facebook to get a job

Because we move huge distances nowadays, away from home towns and old friends, it’s easy to lose contact with people who might be able to give us a leg up in life. Facebook to the rescue…

Ellison et al. (2008) found that Facebook users had higher levels of ‘social capital’. In other words: people are using their Facebook contacts to get jobs or other opportunities.

See, Facebookers aren’t just surfing for photos of people they know and people they’d like to know, they’re building social capital.

At least, that’s the excuse I’ll be using from now on.

Image credit: Rishi Bandopadhay

The Trust Gap: Why People Are So Cynical

How do people come to believe that others are so much less trustworthy than themselves?

Much as we might prefer otherwise, there’s solid evidence that, on average, people are quite cynical about human nature.

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The Acceptance Prophecy: How You Control Who Likes You

Is interpersonal attraction a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The mystical-sounding ‘acceptance prophecy’ is simply this: when we think other people are going to like us, we behave more warmly towards them and consequently they like us more. When we think other people aren’t going to like us, we behave more coldly and they don’t like us as much.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because if we predict acceptance we get it, if not we don’t. It’s also an intuitively appealing explanation for how people come to like (or dislike) each other. But the question for psychologists is whether it is really true or just a neat fairy story.

The waters are, of course, muddied by all the usual individual and cultural differences—some people care more about other’s acceptance and some people are naturally more accepting—but let’s set those aside for a moment and just imagine two people who are identical except that one expects others to accept her and one expects others to reject her.

What the research has found, according to a new paper just published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is that one part of the acceptance prophecy has strong evidence to support it, while the other part does not. Until now.

The first part, in a model put forward by Dr Danu Anthony Stinson at the University of Waterloo and colleagues, is that the interpersonal warmth people project predicts how much others like them (Stinson et al., 2009). For psychologists this is uncontroversial; people take better to others who are genuinely warm with accurate judgements about their warmth made in only 30 seconds (Ambady et al., 2000).

Pleased to meet you

What has proved more controversial is whether anticipating acceptance really does increase the interpersonal warmth that people project towards others. It’s this question that Stinson et al. (2009) set out to test by manipulated people’s expectations about a person they were about to meet for the first time.

They told 14 of 28 men recruited for their study that the attractive woman they were going to meet was nervous and worried about how she would be perceived by them. Quite naturally when these men found that the woman was nervous and insecure it made them feel better in comparison. This had the effect of making the men much less anxious about the interaction (actually about half as nervous as judged by independent observers) and consequently much warmer.

In comparison the other 14 sweaty-palmed participants were only given basic demographic information about the woman they were going to talk to, nothing that would calm their fears of rejection. This manipulation created two groups, then, one that was anticipating acceptance more than the other.

What the results showed was that when the risk of rejection was lower, men acted more warmly towards the woman to whom they were talking. This extra warmth also lead to a panel of observers liking them more in comparison with those who were more fearful of risk and therefore interpersonally colder.

So this provides evidence that the acceptance prophecy holds true. In this experiment people who expected to be accepted did act more warmly towards a stranger and consequently they were perceived as more likeable.

Social optimist or pessimist?

There was an exception, though, to the results of this study. One sub-group were not affected by the experimental manipulation to increase how much they expected to be accepted. That’s because they already expected to be accepted. These are the social optimists (or at least people who think rather a lot of themselves!).

Social optimists, of course, are in the happy position of expecting to be accepted and finding that, generally speaking, they are. Social pessimists, though, face the dark side of what sociologist Robert K. Merton—who coined the expression ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’—has called a ‘reign of error’. Expectation of rejection leads to the projection of colder, more defensive behaviour towards others, and this leads to actual rejection. “Uh-huh,” mutters the social pessimist, “I knew they wouldn’t like me”.

And so it goes.

At the Heart of Attraction Lies Confusion: Choice Blindness

Do you think you’d be able to accurately describe why you find a person attractive?

[Image credit: pablo perez]

Across a crowded room your eyes lock with an attractive stranger. You look away, you look back. The first hint of a smile plays across their lips. Suddenly you’re nervous, your mind goes blank, you want to go over and you want to run away, both at the same time.

You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. ‘Wow,’ you think as you recover, ‘Now, that’s what I’m talking about!’.

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Achieving Rapport: Expressivity, Coordination and Flow

We need rapport to influence others, to teach and learn, to achieve difficult tasks in groups and even to mate.

[Photos by landerson, jonthegm, Sam Rich]

Rapport is important. We need rapport to influence others, to teach and learn, to achieve difficult tasks in groups and even to mate. The latest research reveals gaining rapport is not just about matching body language and being positive, the picture is actually much more complicated. Studies have shown that expressivity is actually one of the most important factors in rapport. An expressive person displays their emotions nonverbally to those around them. Those who are more expressive have been found to elicit greater levels of liking and rapport from others.

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The Nonverbal Symphony of Attraction

Interactions were videotaped from behind a one-way screen and participants were asked afterwards how likely they would be to go on a date with the person they’d met.

[Photo by hendriko]

Glossy magazine articles on the body language of attraction often quote two vital nonverbal factors: posture mirroring and movement echo. The first is where the other person has adopted the same position as you and the second is where they copy your movement. While they both play a role, research suggests it’s not in fact the individual movements, but the patterns of movements that tell the story of attraction between two people.

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