Why do we fall in love with certain people? — Daily Science

This is called the similarity-attraction effect: we generally like people who are like us. Now, new findings from a Boston University researcher have uncovered one reason.

In a series of studies, Charles Chu, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the BU Questrom School of Business, tested the conditions that shape whether we are attracted to, or repulsed by, one another. He discovered that a crucial factor was what psychologists call self-essentialist reasoning, where people imagine they have a deep inner core or essence that shapes them. Chu discovered that when someone believes that an essence drives their interests, likes, and dislikes, they assume that it is the same for others as well; if they find someone with a matching interest, they reason that person will share their larger worldview. The findings were published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“If we were to find an image of our sense of self, it would be this nugget, an almost magical inner core that emanates from and causes what we can see and observe about people and about ourselves,” says Chu, who published the paper with Brian S. Lowery of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “We argue that believing that people have an underlying essence allows us to assume or infer that when we see someone who shares a single characteristic, they must also share my entire deep-seated essence.”

But Chu’s research suggests that this rush to embrace a fundamental, indefinable similarity to someone because of one or two shared interests may be based on faulty thinking, and could restrict who we find a connection with. Working together with the pull of the likeness-attraction effect is a counter-pull: we dislike those we don’t think are like us, often because of one small thing: they like us. that politician, band, book or TV show that we hate.

“We are all so complex,” Chu says. “But we only get a full view of 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 in the minds of others with our own sense of identity and that can sometimes lead to unwarranted assumptions.”

trying to understand other people

To examine why we are attracted to some people and not others, Chu prepared four studies, each designed to uncover different aspects of how we make friends or enemies.

In the first study, participants were told about a fictional person, Jamie, who had complementary or contradictory attitudes toward them. After asking participants for their views on one of five topics (abortion, capital punishment, gun ownership, animal testing, and physician-assisted suicide), Chu asked how they felt about Jamie, who agreed. or disagree with them on the objective issue. They were also questioned about the roots of his identity to gauge his affinity for self-essentialist reasoning.

Chu found that the more a participant believed that their world view was made up of an essential core, the more they felt connected to the Jamie who shared their views on an issue.

In a second study, he tested whether that effect persisted when the target topics were less substantive. Rather than probe whether people agreed with Jamie on something as divisive as abortion, Chu asked participants to estimate the number of blue dots on a page, then categorized them, and the fictional Jamie, as overestimaters or underestimaters. Even with this small connection, the findings held up: the more someone believed in an essential core, the closer they felt to Jamie as a fellow overestimater or underestimater.

“I found that with both fairly significant dimensions of similarity and arbitrary, minimal similarities, people who have a higher belief that they have one essence are more likely to be attracted to these similar ones rather than different ones,” he says. Chu.

In two follow-up studies, Chu began to disrupt this attraction process, removing the influence of self-essentialist reasoning. In one experiment, he labeled attributes (such as liking a particular painting) as essential or non-essential; in another, he told participants that using their scent to judge another person could lead to an inaccurate evaluation of others.

“It breaks this essentialist reasoning process, it cuts off people’s ability to assume that what they’re seeing reflects a deeper similarity,” Chu says. “One way I did it was to remind people that this dimension of similarity isn’t really connected or related to your essence at all; the other way was to tell people that using your essence as a way of understanding other people It’s not very effective.”

Negotiation Psychology and Politics at Work

Chu says there’s a key tension in his findings that shape their real-world application. On one hand, we all seek our community: it’s fun to hang out with people who share our hobbies and interests, love the same music and books we do, don’t disagree with us on politics. “This kind of thinking is a really useful heuristic psychological strategy,” says Chu. “It allows people to see more of themselves in new people and in strangers.” But it also excludes people, establishes divisions and limits, sometimes for very weak reasons.

“When you hear a single fact or opinion expressed that you agree or disagree with, it really deserves to take an extra breath and just slow down,” he says. “Not necessarily taking that one piece of information and extrapolating it, using this kind of thinking to get to the bottom line, that this person is fundamentally good and like me or fundamentally bad and not like me.”

Chu, whose background combines the study of organizational behavior and psychology, teaches negotiation classes at Questrom and says his research has many implications in the business world, particularly when it comes to making deals.

“I define negotiations as conversations, agreements, and disagreements about how power and resources should be distributed among people,” he says. “What inferences do we make about the other people we’re having these conversations with? How do we experience and think about agreeing versus disagreeing? How do we interpret when someone gets more and someone else gets less? These are all really central questions to the process. of negotiation”.

But at a time when political division has invaded nearly every sphere of our lives, including the workplace, the applications of Chu’s findings go far beyond corporate bargaining. People management, project collaboration, team bonding: it’s all determined by the judgments we make of others. Self-essentialist reasoning can even influence the distribution of society’s resources, Chu says: who we deem worthy of support, who receives funding and who doesn’t, could be driven by “this belief that people’s outcomes are caused by for something deep inside of them.” “That’s why he advocates pausing before judging someone who, on the face of it, doesn’t look like you.

“There are ways to go through life and meet other people, and form impressions of other people, without constantly referencing ourselves,” he says. “If we’re constantly running around trying to figure it out, who is like me, who is not like me? that’s not always the most productive way to try to form impressions of other people. People are much more complex than we think.”