Why are we attracted to certain people?
It’s no secret that we’re drawn to people with similar interests as us. This phenomenon is known as the similarity-attraction effect. Charles Chu, an assistant professor of management and organisations at Boston University Questrom School of Business, carried out a series of four experiments that answer why we usually fall for people who are like us. The findings were published in the ‘Journal of Personality and Social Psychology’.
The science of attraction
A key factor that influences attraction or repulsion is self-essentialist reasoning. “Our attraction to people who share our attributes is aided by the belief that those shared attributes are driven by something deep within us: one’s essence,” explained Asst Prof. Chu in ‘Neuroscience News’. “To put it concretely, we like someone who agrees with us on a political issue, shares our music preferences, or simply laughs at the same thing as us not purely because of those similarities, but because those similarities suggest something more—this person is, in essence, like me, and as such, they share my views of the world at large.” “We argue that believing people have an underlying essence allows us to assume or infer that when we see someone who shares a single characteristic, they must share my entire deeply rooted essence, as well,” he further elaborated in a Boston University news article.
The challenge of understanding others’ thoughts and feelings
Asst Prof. Chu says this thinking is flawed, and it could be a limiting factor with someone we find a connection. Put simply, we’re not so interested in people who don’t share our passion for things like music, sports and nature. “We are all so complex. But we only have full insight into our own thoughts and feelings, and the minds of others are often a mystery to us. What this work suggests is that we often fill in the blanks of others’ minds with our own sense of self and that can sometimes lead us into some unwarranted assumptions.” Let’s not judge someone during our first encounter if they don’t seem similar to us. “There are ways for us to go through life and meet other people, and form impressions of other people, without constantly referencing ourselves,” concluded Asst Prof. Chu. “If we’re constantly going around trying to figure out, who’s like me, who’s not like me?, that’s not always the most productive way of trying to form impressions of other people. People are a lot more complex than we give them credit for.”
Keywords
attraction, similarity-attraction, self-essentialist reasoning, essence, impression