Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.
Lecture 7.3: Romantic Attraction and Close Relationships
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Social Psychology
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WEEK 7: A Happy End to the Course
This week's goals are to: (1) consider whether empathy is a "magic bullet" for addressing social problems; (2) learn what the most important ingredients are for a happy life; (3) find out what researchers have discovered about romantic attraction and close relationships; and (4) hear about additional resources and organizations if you want to continue studying social psychology.
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Scott PlousProfessor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Department of Psychology
I'd like to begin this lecture with a question about
your friends, and if you have one, your romantic partner.
When you think about the people you've chosen as a friend or a partner,
what's the single most important factor that led you to be with one person and not another?
Let's consider some possibilities. The person is kind or generous,
smart or skilled, fun to be with, physically attractive,
shares your values and attitudes, likes to do the same things you do.
Or maybe, it's none of the above.
What researchers have found is that in many cases, it is none of the above.
Surprisingly, there's a very powerful factor that we rarely think of as
important but is essential when it comes to friendship and romantic choices.
That factor is known as proximity or closeness—
not just physical closeness, but social closeness—
that is, opportunities to interact.
This is one of the reasons why people so often end up becoming
friends with—or even marrying— their classmates,
their co-workers, their neighbors, and so on.
The classic study on proximity and attraction was published
in 1950 by Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back.
These researchers looked at friendship formation
in a new housing project for married students.
The project was made up of a series of small houses
arranged like horseshoes around a courtyard area.
So, the researchers could examine factors such as how many houses away
students were from their closest friends, whether the students
lived on an end unit or in between two other houses, and so on.
Summarizing the research, Festinger had this to say:
"The two major factors affecting the friendships which developed were
(1) sheer distance between houses and (2) the direction in which a house faced.
Friendships developed more frequently between next-door neighbors,
less frequently between people whose houses were
separated by another house, and so on.
As the distance between houses increased, the number of friendships
fell off so rapidly that it was rare to find a friendship
between persons who lived in houses that
were separated by more than four or five other houses."
Interesting, huh?
I mean, these houses are not very far apart from each other—
I think only about 20 feet from door to door.
So to see that kind of sharp drop off
after only four or five houses is really pretty dramatic.
But the results get even more remarkable.
I went to my university library and picked up the Journal of Social Issues,
where Leon Festinger published another account of the research,
because I want to read a particular passage to you—
a particularly noteworthy passage.
So bear with me. He wrote:
"In order to have the street appear lived on, ten of the houses
near the street had been turned so that they faced the street
rather than the court area like the other houses.
This apparently small change in the direction in which a house
faced had a considerable effect on the lives of the people
who by accident happened to occupy these end houses.
They had less than half as many friends in the project,
as did those whose houses faced the court area.
The consistency of this finding left no doubt that the turning of
these houses toward the street had made involuntary social
isolates out of the persons who lived in them."
I mean, really quite amazing to think that
such a small change in the direction of the
house would have such a large effect on
the social lives of the people who live there.
I also happened to check out the book
that Festinger and his colleagues published about the study.
And here you can see a picture of what the housing project looked like.
There, you see that there are streets running
through it and courtyard areas, and so on.
And Festinger and his colleagues also replicated
the results in ways that supported these conclusions.
For example, they found that the most popular residents
in an apartment complex tended to be the people whose
apartments were located near stairwells, which have a lot of traffic.
And people who live near mailboxes— again, where there's a lot of
foot traffic—tend to have more active social lives than do others.
Something to keep in mind if you're ever apartment hunting!
Well, in addition to proximity, another factor
that's very important in interpersonal attraction is similarity.
Research has shown that people tend to be more attracted
to others who are similar to them in age and education level,
race and ethnicity, personality and attitudes, economic status, and even
certain physical characteristics, such as height, wrist size, and blood type.
The last few correlations tend to be small,
and it's not always clear why they occur.
It might be a function of common ethnicity,
shared ancestry, migration patterns, and so on.
But regardless, similarity is important for
both friendship formation and the choice of romantic partners.
So birds of a feather really do flock together,
and the idea that opposites attract, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—
something known formally as the "complementarity hypothesis"—
has received relatively little research support.
Even though it's a romantic idea, and there are always exceptions,
people don't tend to choose friends or partners
who have backgrounds, attitudes, or values that complement theirs.
They're much more likely to choose friends
and partners who are similar to themselves.
Here, you can see your answer to a Snapshot Quiz item on this topic.
Another interesting line of research has to do with
how much physical attractiveness matters.
This is a factor that doesn't seem like it could be studied scientifically,
but in fact, hundreds of carefully controlled studies
have been published on physical attraction.
Here, for example, are a couple of questions that researchers have asked:
After people go out on a date with someone,
how much does physical attractiveness determine whether
they'll want to continue dating the person?
And does the answer differ for females and males?
The answer is that physical attractiveness matters quite a bit,
for females as well as males. Studies have found that
the physical attractiveness of a date correlates
more strongly with a desire to continue dating that
person than almost any other factor studied,
including judgments of character
and the perception of common interests.
In general, cross-cultural research suggests that
men express more concern about physical attractiveness than do women,
but when it comes to actual partners— that is, ratings of
people rather than ratings of general attributes—men and women
value physical attractiveness to nearly the same degree.
In the very first lecture of the course, I raised a question given in the
Snapshot Quiz about whether physically attractive people
are seen as less intelligent than other people. The answer,
as covered in this week's assigned reading, is just the opposite.
They're seen as more intelligent. Let's pause for a minute
so that you can see your answer in the Snapshot Quiz.
As covered in this week's assigned reading, we learn
from childhood on that beautiful people are good people—
the princesses, the movie stars, and so on—
and that leads to a kind of physical attractiveness stereotype.
And as long as we're talking about the Snapshot Quiz,
let's examine one other item that has to do with attraction:
The question of whether women are faster than men
at falling in love and slower to end a relationship.
The answer, according to the research record, is once again
just the opposite. It's men who tend to be faster at falling in love
and slower at falling out of love.
This is a finding that surprises many people, and again, illustrates
why research on relationships is so interesting and worth doing.
Let's pause for a moment so that you can see your answer in the Snapshot Quiz.
Now, so far we've been focused on the factors that bring people together,
but what about after two people are together?
What are the key predictors of success in a relationship?
And how accurate are people at predicting whether their relationships will last?
For example, imagine that you're a college student,
and you've been dating somebody for a few months.
If you want to know whether you and your partner will still be
together after a year, who would make the most accurate prediction:
You, a roommate who knows the relationship, or a parent who
knows the relationship? Well, a study was conducted on this very question,
and it turns out that if you ask students to predict
whether their dating relationships will still be around after a year,
they're less accurate than their dormitory roommates or their parents.
Why?
Because they're motivated to believe that the relationship will continue,
so they neglect disconfirming evidence, whereas parents
and roommates weigh the good and the bad.
But let's return for a moment to the question of
what the key predictors are of relationship success.
The answer for men, as we all know,
is to be able to balance a seated person using only your teeth.
And the men who can do this while walking up and down stairs
are especially successful in their relationships.
This finding was first discovered by circus entertainers nearly
a century ago and has since been replicated several times.
Of course, for women, the story is very different.
What matters most is to be able to
grip a chair in your teeth while dancing.
And of course, the women who can do this while lying down
or twirling are even more likely to have relationship success.
Researchers have been trying to figure out why this is the case,
and even though no one's quite sure,
most experts agree that the research topic is highly entertaining.
Okay, I'm joking around, of course, but there is a point,
which is that it's very hard to make generalizations
about the predictors of relationship success,
or relationship satisfaction, because relationships vary so much
over time, across cultures, even within cultures.
So, we have to be very careful not to overgeneralize.
Having said that, there are some findings that do seem to have
some generality, one of which is that similarity is important
not only in attraction but in relationship satisfaction. For example,
when wives and husbands have similar personalities and interests,
they tend to report greater marital satisfaction and happiness.
And demographic similarities such as age, education, and religion,
are also significant predictors of satisfaction and stability
in friendships, romantic relationships, and marriages.
Another factor that I'd like to discuss is
one that's been studied mostly in the United States,
so it may not apply cross-culturally
but it would still be very interesting to discuss in the class forums.
At least in the United States, marital satisfaction is much higher when
people believe that household work and childcare have been divided fairly.
In fact, the Pew Research Center published a national study
in the U.S. on this topic, subtitled, "I Like Hugs. I Like Kisses.
But What I Really Love is Help with the Dishes."
What the study found was that 62 percent of those surveyed
saw shared household chores as very important for a successful marriage—
almost as many as the number who saw sex as very important,
and ahead of adequate income, good housing and shared religious beliefs.
One last topic that I'd like to discuss is whether couples who rarely fight
with each other are more likely than other couples to stay together.
And the answer here might surprise you.
Although the research record is somewhat mixed,
it appears that the amount of conflict in a relationship—for example,
the number of arguments—does not do a very good job of predicting
the level of marital happiness or whether a couple will stay together.
What does seem to matter is the overall ratio of positive
to negative interactions— on the positive side,
things like touching, smiling, complimenting, laughing together,
and on the negative side, arguing, insulting, blaming, and so on.
In fact, John Gottman, who's one of the leading researchers
in this area, has been able to predict marital success
surprisingly well based on whether a couple's ratio of
positive to negative interactions is at least five-to-one.
That is, he finds that if a couple has
at least five positive interactions for every negative one,
regardless of how many negative interactions take place,
the couple will probably stay together.
On the other hand, marriages that fall below
that magic figure of five-to-one are at high risk for divorce.
Dr. Gottman was kind enough to let me share a one-minute clip
in which he discusses the ratio, so let's watch.
>> Let me start by talking about what it is we learned
that allows us to predict divorce or stability with very high accuracy.
The first thing we found was that if you take a look at
the ratio of positive stuff during conflict—
things like interest, asking questions, being nice to one another,
being kind, being affectionate, being empathetic—
and you look at all the negative stuff like criticism, hostility,
anger, hurt feelings—and you take the ratio of positive to negative,
in relationships that stay together, that ratio turns out to be five-to-one.
There's five times as many positive things going on in relationships
that work as negative. That's an interesting equation, and it sort of suggests that
if you do something negative to hurt your partner's feelings,
you know, that you have to make up for it with five positive things.
So, the equation is not balanced in terms of positive and negative.
Negative has a lot more ability to inflict pain and damage
than positive things have to heal and bring you closer.
>> Of all the relationship research and advice that I've read
over the years, this particular finding I think is one of the most useful.
I think about that five-to-one ratio not only in terms of marriages and romantic relationships,
but also relationships with parents, children,
colleagues, students, and others.
That is, when there's a problem— when there's a conflict—
I try to make sure that there are at least five positive interactions
to keep the relationship strong, to keep it healthy.
And I hope that the information in this video
and in the assigned reading also benefits your relationships
and keeps the romance and the fireworks going.
In fact, what better way to end this video
than with some fireworks? Enjoy!
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