In the study of interpersonal attraction, the field has seen big methodological and theoretical advances over the past 75 years. Researchers have explored attraction in the laboratory and the field and in real and artificial relationships. However, despite the advancements and discoveries, serious critiques regarding attraction research have persisted. For instance, researchers have disagreed about how to measure or conceptualize attraction, they have disagreed about the theoretical orientation to use to study attraction, the adequacy of experimental work for elucidating the course of interpersonal attraction and the need to study attraction across time. The consequence of these agreements has been a fragmented field, one that has no unified theoretical model. The goal of this article is to address the disagreements and present a unified model of interpersonal attraction. The writers will discuss the definition and measurement of the attraction construct, propose a two-dimensional model of attraction based on person perception and relationship research and describe how much a model can account for a wide range of disparate findings related to interpersonal attraction. The model proposes that two dimensions influence interpersonal attraction by indicating a target’s capacity to facilitate the needs/goals of a perceiver and willingness to facilitate such needs and goals.

Definition

The attraction literature has disagreed about the definition of attraction and some definitions are really confusing. Interpersonal attraction is thought of as a positive emotional evaluation of another person, but it is often operationalized behaviourally (proximity of chair placement) or cognitively (assessment of traits). Of course, the word attachment originally referred to the body’s tendency to absorb fluids and to the ability for an object to draw an object to itself. Some researchers have maintained the focus on drawing one person to the other. Others have emphasized the affective feeling positively toward or the cognitive positive attributes dimensions. The writers define attraction as a person’s immediate and positive affective and/or behavioural response to a specific individual. This response is influenced by the person’s cognitive assessments. According to this then, attraction has two components: an affective component that reflects the quality of one’s emotional response toward another and a behavioural component that reflects one’s tendency to act in a particular way toward another. The writers use the term ‘attraction’ or ‘liking’ when the individual components are consonant. In other cases they use the terms ‘behavioural attraction’ and ‘affective attraction’ to describe the two components. The writers also think that attraction doesn’t include a cognitive component, but rather is preceded and influenced by two distinct cognitive assessments of a target: a willingness assessment and a capacity assessment.

The relation between affective and behavioural attraction also needs to be discussed. These two components are likely to be strongly related in most circumstances. The two components are probably influenced by different factors. Researchers think that behaviour evaluations are more dependent on social context and self-interest considerations than are affective evaluations. The dependence on context results from the importance of behavioural attraction increasing the likelihood of receiving potential rewards from an interaction and the amount of information gained about the other person. An example of this is accepting a ride from an acquaintance whom you do not like. Affective attraction is in that case low and behavioural attraction rather high. Attraction should not be confused with romantic love, friendship or attachment.

Two-dimensional models in other research

The person perception literature has provided tremendous consensus regarding the two fundamental dimensions on which humans make social judgments: assessing the capacity of the other person (skill/competence) and assessing the willingness (warmth/trust) of the other person to benefit the perceiver’s goals.

Person perception research identified warm-cold and competence-related adjectives as critical to interpersonal evaluations and anthropological evidence also pointed toward these same two dimensions. Wjociszke proposed that the two fundamental dimensions of person perception are morality and competence. Morality traits (honest, trustworthy) refer to goals of the person and the relation of those goals to moral norms. Competency traits (intelligent, capable) refer to the efficiency with which those moral goals are attained. Research has also confirmed these two dimensions as fundamental to the evaluations of social groups. Human faces are also evaluated on two dimensions: valence (trustworthiness) and power. Relationship and friendship researchers also identify ability and trustworthiness as central to relationship-related judgments.

Two-dimensional approach to interpersonal attraction

The writers think that perception serves an adaptive function in facilitating an individual’s interests and reproductive goals. All animate life has developed a mechanism to regulate movement away from harmful environmental stimuli. The decision to approach or go away from an environmental stimulus is a fundamentally adaptive decision that all organisms make. The two-dimensional model of attraction posits that such approach/avoidance decisions and the affective responses that often accompany them, flow from the trustworthiness/warmth and competence/ability assessments from the person perception. The two-dimensional model also posits that a perceiver’s goals and interests are of fundamental importance to his/her attraction to a certain person. Goals can vary in importance across time and situation. Some goals are constantly high in motivational priority across time and situations. These goals are social acceptance, avoidance of pain and self-interest. Achievement and reproductive goals are more situation-specific and time-specific. When there is no situation-specific goal salient, people’s chronic goals will maintain their relative motivational priority and guide assessments of other people along the dimensions. When a goal is made salient, people will make evaluations to determine the extent to which the other person facilitates or hinder the activated goal. Attraction can be affected by such goal, whether the goal is explicit or implicit.

Capacity

People make many assessment about others. The capacity assessment refers to the degree to which an individual is evaluated as possessing the qualities necessary to facilitate or hinder the perceiver’s goals. According to the two-dimensional model, people evaluate others with respect to the dimensions critical for facilitation of active goals. People have different goals in different relationships and these differing goals are met most effectively by other people with different characteristics. This suggests that attraction should change accordingly. An example of this is that individuals prefer emotional closeness more in romantic partners compared with same or other sex friends and the ‘feel better’ sharing material resources with siblings than strangers. Evaluations of people are affected by the degree to which they are viewed as helping or inhibiting one’s goals. When a goal is activated, people and objects that were viewed as able to facilitate one’s goal were evaluated more favourably than those that were not. Research shows that people categorize individuals of ‘useful’ and ‘not useful’ relative to their activated goal. Which goals are of interest differs within the same person across time. Research has shown that women who were ovulating, expressed a stronger preference for socially dominant men than did women who were not ovulating. This was only the case when considering the men’s attractiveness for a short-term relationship. According to evolutionary theories, when reproductive goals are active, the quality of the man’s genes is more critical. There are also some differences between the goals of men and women. According to evolutionary theories, men focus more on physical attractiveness and youth. This is because they want women who are able to pass on good genes. Women prefer status, power and the potential to acquire resources.

Willingness

Willingness refers to the degree to which a person is evaluated as willing to potentially facilitate the interest/goals of the perceiver. This definition of willingness looks like the definition of trust. Trust is the expectancy that another will act benevolently toward you. Definitions of warmth and morality are also consistent with this definition of willingness. There is a consensus regarding the definition of trust, but researchers have not always differentiated between trust and near-by constructs, like confidence, loyalty and honesty. These other constructs concern whether a person will act in a trustworthy way during a future interaction. However, trust takes a more specific meaning. In a boss-employer relationship, general trustworthiness assessments are indicative of another’s dependability, but in a fraternity, general trustworthiness assessments are characterized as another’s loyalty. The capacity assessment depends more on the context and the willingness assessment reflects a general and stable belief that the other person is potentially inclined toward facilitating interests even outside of the context in which the judgment is made. People must engage in exchanges with unacquainted others, with other for the purpose of mating and as part of intergroup or intragroup interactions. The success of the social relationship partly depends on the belief in other person’s potential willingness to facilitate beneficial outcomes. Trust is desired in relationship partners, because it predicts who will help with the acquisition of valued resources.

The writers posit that cues to another’s capacity and willingness are weighted subjectively relative to activated goals. Attraction to a person results from the integration of these individual assessments. The two-dimensional model states that an attraction assessment can be predicted by a weighted combination of the capacity assessment and willingness-to benefit assessment. The formula is difficult to put in Word, so if you want to see the formula of this, you have to look on page 65 of the article.

Determinants of attraction

There has been much research on the attraction phenomena and in the next part, it will be discussed how these phenomena can be understood in terms of the two-dimensional model.

Reciprocity effect

Research has showed that people like those who express liking for them. This is called the reciprocity effect. This effect has been demonstrated between groups and individuals. Accordingly, people should help, or at least do no harm to, those who have helped them. From the perspective of the two-dimensional model, reciprocated attraction operates via changes in willingness-to-benefit information. Researchers have shown that learning that one is liked by another person leads to attraction, but not because it activates a reciprocity norm. it works because the received attraction conveys the admirer’s intent to act in a trustworthy way during a future interaction. This suggests two effects. The first is that expressed attraction leads to expectations of benevolence in the admirer and the second is that expectations of benevolence lead to reciprocated attraction to the admirer. Research has confirmed this. The reciprocity effect is more potent if an individual perceives that a target person has made a costly sacrifice of his or her self-interest. From the model perspective, people are more likely to perceive a person who gives up a great deal to an exchange with them as willing to facilitate beneficial interactions in the future and thus as more attractive. The power of the reciprocity effect is also affected by the perceived motives of the admirer. If the motives are viewed sincere, attraction is reciprocated. If there is no sincerity, attraction is less likely to be reciprocated.

Desirable characteristics

Research shows that people prefer to affiliate with others who possess particular attributes, including health, intelligence and good earning capacity. The model proposes that a characteristics leads to attraction when it is perceived to make a target more capable of facilitating the perceiver’s interests. Positive characteristics are considered to convey information about capacity. Favourable capacity assessments are often linked to increased attraction, but this is not always the case. For instance, group followers do not always select the most capable individual as their leader. This is because the most competent individuals are not always rated as the most capable. So-called ‘pratfall studies’ found that participants were more attracted to a competent target when that target committed an embarrassing blunder than when the target did not commit the blunder. The blunder makes a person seem more human. There are also other exceptions to being most attracted to people with the most favourable characteristics. There is much evidence that people are most attracted to those who are highly physically attractive, but people end up pairing up with others who match their level of physical attractiveness, more-or-less. This is referred to as the matching effect. People probably assume that highly attractive others are more likely to reject them (low in willingness-to-benefit) than less-attractive others.

The model also sheds light on the important role of self-esteem in romantic behaviour. Someone’s self-esteem is associated with the way willingness-to-benefit information is interpreted. One research found that people felt more accepted by a confederate who smiled and laughed than one who smiled less and maintained less eye contact. However, the results also showed that when there was the possibility of rejection, participants with low self-esteem reported fewer acceptance cues from the confederate, despite the presence of these same positive signs of willingness (smiling, eye contact). This suggests that for individuals with low self-esteem, these behaviours are either missed or are interpreted as signs of acceptance and this in turn is associated with a less-favourable willingness-to benefit assessment and thus less attraction. Evidence also shows that people with an unfavourable self-evaluation believe it less likely that they can attract a desirable target than do individuals with a favourable self-evaluation. One study showed that when a man’s self-esteem was experimentally lowered, they showed more romantic approach behaviours toward a moderately physically attractive woman than toward a very attractive woman. Men whose self-esteem was raised, showed the reverse pattern.

Presence of arousal

Research has found that dissonance and physiological arousal can be associated with more attraction. The two-dimensional model is used to explain how attraction can result from the anticipation of negative state and past negative-state experiences. Research has shown that exposure to a noxious stimulus increased participants’ behavioural attraction to another person who was to share the same noxious stimulus. It seems that misery does enjoy only miserable company. According to research, there are a few explanations for the affiliative desires of those in high-anxiety conditions. These are cognitive clarity, wanting to affiliate to understand the painful consequences that awaits someone and direct anxiety reduction, which referred to affiliating to secure comfort and assurance from others. Other research showed that patients facing surgery were more attracted to those who were capable of meeting their desire for information, compared with those who were less capable, even though the latter was more similar in their current state of anxiety. Initiation studies look at increased attraction following a harsh initiation to a group. One study found that a female participant’s attraction to a group was more favourable after she endured a severe, rather than a mild, initiation to get into it. Cognitive dissonance is the accepted explanation for this effect. People do not want to hold opposing beliefs (being harshly initiated and disliking the group). Some researchers have found that degrading situations increase affiliation motivations, because degrading situations aroused negative emotions that were expected to be reduced by the acceptance by others.

Similarity

Many studies have shown that increased similarity to a target (attitudes, personality) increased attraction to the target. However, researchers are still debating the explanations for the link between similarity and attraction. Some researchers explain it by proposing that a target who possesses similar attitudes is reinforcing because the target’s attributes confirm the legitimacy and accuracy of one’s own attitudes. Some researchers think that the positive affect associated with similar others only partially mediates the similarity effect. They proposed that the similarity effect resulted from a process involving the capacity assessment. They hypothesized that people assume that similar others are simply better, more-effective people. Similar attitudes imply positive information about the attributes of the target and this positive information constitutes a favourable capacity assessment of the target person that drives attraction. Studies have shown that the similarity effect is greater when information about a target person’s competence is made salient and that capacity information mediates the effect of similarity on attraction. Also, capacity assessments partially mediate the similarity effect even when controlling for willingness information.

One interpretation of the similarity effect emphasizes the willingness-to-benefit assessment. This interpretation proposes that the similarity effect is mediated by the person’s belief that a similar other will accept or like the individual. Studies found that expectations of acceptance and similarity tended to be highly correlated. A recent study has assessed the different explanations for the similarity effect. In one study, researchers manipulated similarity between a participant and a target and then assessed perceived acceptance (willingness-to-benefit), the target’s perceived capacity, attraction to target and positive affect. When these mediators were tested individually, affect partially mediated the similarity effect and willingness and capacity assessments fully mediated the similarity effect. When these mediators were tested simultaneously, the similarity effect was more strongly mediated by willingness assessment than by the capacity assessment. Affect failed to mediate link. The researchers concluded that an assessment of willingness and capacity are necessary to fully account for the similarity effect.

Research needs to look more into the model, because it may prove useful for understanding non-conscious attraction phenomena. The writers of this text have not yet looked into this. There may be even more mechanisms underlying effects of attraction, like behavioural mimicry or associative effects.