Social Psychology Test 4 The Need to Belong o Belongingness is a Basic Need Fundamental and powerful human need Need both regular social contact and stable relationships with mutual a situation in which other people have come to like you anything that draws two or more people together making them concern Attraction want to be together and possibly to form a lasting relationship Social acceptance respect you approve of you and include you in their groups and relationships Rejection social exclusion keeping a social bond with them the opposite of social acceptance The need to belong lasting relationships with some other individuals is defined as the desire to form and maintain close being prevented by others from forming or This drives people to affiliate commit and remain together and it makes them reluctant to live alone o Two Ingredients to Belongingness The need to belong has two parts o Not Belonging is Bad For You People want some kind of regular social contacts People want the stable framework of some ongoing relationship in which the people share a mutual concern for each other Some people want more friends than others but most people seem to think that having about four to six close relationships is enough The need to belong is called a need rather than a want because when it is thwarted people suffer more than just being unhappy Loneliness is hard on the body impairing its natural powers including the immune system and its ability to recover from sickness or injury what people actively do to try to make someone like them Ingratiation People like good looking friendly people who are similar to themselves in important ways and they like people who are nice to them Attraction Who Likes Whom o Friendship is Good How do we get it Similarity Propinquity Reciprocity Social Rewards Physical Attractiveness o Similarity Complementary Oppositeness Two old clich s make opposite predictions about who likes whom Birds of a feather flock together suggests that people mainly like others who resemble themselves Opposites attract suggests that people are drawn to people dissimilar to themselves In any case decades of research by social psychologists have produced a clear and definite winner in this battle of clich s 1 Opposites do not attract very often Birds of a feather are the ones who end up flocking together and staying together Similarity is a common and significant cause of attraction Experiment Chartrand Bargh 1999 Confederate and participant engaged in interaction Confederate mimicked participant s body language or not How much did participant like confederate o Participant liked the confederate more when he she mimicked his her body language People who are high in self monitoring the ability to change one s behavior for different situations seek to maximize each social situation whereas those low in that trait pay more attention to permanent connections and feelings rather than fluctuating ones The matching hypothesis states that people tend to pair up with others who are equally attractive This is especially true among lovers but it is also true among friends There is some evidence that matching is driven more by rejecting dissimilar others than by liking similar others The attraction to similar others is probably social rather than cultural the proposition that people and animals will o Social Rewards You Make me Feel Good Reinforcement theory perform behaviors that have been rewarded more than they will perform other behaviors The two themes of ingratiation research confirm the importance of interpersonal rewards A first broad strategy for getting someone to like you is to do favors for that person By definition favors bring benefits to the recipient and therefore favors make the person feel positively toward the person who did the favor The second broad strategy involves praise Most people feel good when they receive a compliment so if you want someone to like you you will probably be tempted to give that person plenty of compliments o Tit for Tat Reciprocity and Liking Reciprocity is also important in liking Having someone like you is powerful at a deep gut level it is hard to resist liking that person in return Why should trustworthiness be the single most important trait for social appeal When you form a bond with someone you expect to do positive things for that person Trustworthiness means that you can expect the other person to reciprocate o Mere Exposure The propinquity effect Proximity 2 How attractive How similar Social allergy effect more annoying o Looking Good The more we see and interact with people the more likely we are to become friends with them People like those who are similar to them who like them back and who make them feel food People sometimes like others based on nothing more than familiarity they grow to like people whom they encounter on a regular basis being near someone on a regular basis Propinquity Sometimes physical closeness isn t as big a deal Functional distance has taken on a new form Experiment Moreland Beach 1990 4 women enrolled in class Each showed up different amounts of time 0 5 10 15 the idea that a partner s annoying habits become What is beautiful is good effect the assumption that physically attractive people will be superior to others on many other traits People are more likely to seek out friendships with physically attractive people Appearance does matter Experiment Welcome week study 1966 Matched first year students for dance Personality and aptitude tests Asked to evaluate dates What predicted interest Experiment Eagly et al 1991 Physically attractive people are seen as more o Sociable o Extraverted o Popular o Likable o Happy Rejection Ostracism refers to being excluded rejected and ignored by others o Effects of Rejection Inner Reactions Rejection sensitivity become hypersensitive to possible rejection a tendency to expect rejection form others and to Not all rejection produces an immediate wave of emotional distress however Panksepp The initial reaction to rejection is often closer to numbness than to anxiety or sadness MacDonald and Leary Rejected excluded animals lose pain sensitivity Social emotion system piggybacks on physical pain system 3 So perhaps rejection stuns creates temporary numbness to both pain and emotion Experiment When experimenters used a device called a pressure algometer people who were told that they would have a future alone had a significantly higher pressure threshold and pain tolerance than
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