Attraction And Interpersonal Attraction

The positive feelings we experience with regards to another person is referred to as interpersonal attraction. This can manifest in many forms from admiration to friendship and more carnal feelings. There are many factors which influence our attraction to others. Some of which are particularly subtle, while some of which are key to our understanding of attraction. I will discuss how Affiliation, proximity, familiarity, similarity and physical attractiveness all play a huge role in influencing our attraction to other people. These are considered by many to be some of the main factors which influence attraction.
Everyone has different motives when it comes to seeking social contact. Some people have a very strong necessity for affiliation and

They merely become familiar things. This can be considered one of the reasons companies bombard us with repetitive advertisements. 3. Zajonc demonstrated with three experiments the mere exposure effect. “He showed participants stimuli with different exposure frequencies and asked them to rate their favourability towards the stimuli. The first experiment used nonsense words as stimuli, the second used Chinese-like characters, and the third used photos from a yearbook. The more the participants were exposed to a stimulus, the more they liked it. A wide variety of stimuli, in both lab and non-lab settings, have been shown to elicit the mere exposure

It is only in recent years that physical attractiveness was looked upon from a scientific point of view and not simply a poetic or philosophical pondering. We now know that we have a predisposition to see physical attraction as the primary factor of romantic attraction. When people first begin to date, they are more attracted to the partners they deem to be more physically attractive 1. Another example of physical attraction as an influential factor of our attraction to others is seen in the matching hypothesis. The matching hypothesis proposes that the forming of a successful relationship is far more prone to occurring with people whom they consider to have an equal level of physical attractiveness to themselves.