Pleased to meet you: Understanding the key components of interpersonal attraction to a stranger

FEDERICO ZIMMERMAN; MARIANO SIGMAN; JOAQUIN NAVAJAS

Conferencia; Aegina Summer School 2019; 2019

The financial and the judicial systems are pillars of every country. Although they are intended to be impartial and fair, we know for a fact that many financial and judiciary of those decisions are influenced by human biases. For example, increases in interpersonal attraction can lead to larger loans (Golightly et al., 1972) and shorter judicial sentences (Griffitt et al., 1973).Although many studies tried to understand the key components of interpersonal attraction to a stranger, a unified theory failed to emerge because of the vast number of confounding variables and small sample size typically used in experimental psychology. To address these issues, we performed an unprecedented large-scale behavioral experiment (N>5.000) in a real scenario for studying which are the key aspects that influence interpersonal attraction after a short interaction.Previous studies have shown that attraction towards a target is increased by its similarity with the subject (Byrne, 1971). However, it remains unclear how people compute similarity in domains such as politics. For example, people could perceive other people as similar others based on the number of topics on which they agree or based on much broader views such as their political orientation. In line with the latter hypothesis, previous studies have shown that partisanship produces positive impressions for in-group members and negative for out-group others (Munro et al., 2010, Crawford et al., 2012, Toner et al., 2013).We reproduced the effect of similarity on attraction (p