The Formation Of Romantic Relationships Flashcards
Similarity
Similarity of personality and attitudes promotes liking. We first sort potential partners for dissimilarity avoiding those who are too different.
From those remaining we can then choose those who are most similar to us so we are more likely to form relationships with people more similar to us
Reward/need satisfaction theory
We are attracted to people who provide us with direct reinforcement. Rewarding stimuli lead to positive feelings and punishing stimuli lead to negative feelings which is operant conditioning. So we enter into relationships because that person creates positive feelings in Us Which makes us feel happy and secure. We don’t enter into relationships if they create negative feelings in us.
We are also attracted to people who are associated with pleasant events. They acquire positive value because of their association with something else that makes us happy which is classical conditioning.
Relationship is likely to succeed when the positive feelings outweigh the negative feelings and likely to fail when negative feelings outweigh positive feelings
AO2
Research support for the reward/need satisfaction theory for this comes from griffit and guay. They found that ppts who were rated on a creative task rated an experimenter for how much they liked them was highest when the experimenter had positively evaluated the participant which produced positive feelings in them showing credit towards theory. Study lacked external validity in real world settings and real world relationship formation because it doesn’t give any indication as to whether this leads to relationship formation.
A second claim of the theory is that we like people who are associated with pleasant events. Griffit and guay carried out another study where ppts had to say how much they liked an onlooker. The onlooker was rated more highly in the condition where the performance of the ppts had been positively evaluated by the experimenter. Ppts rated both individuals the same showing that the ppts associated them with pleasant events and this makes the formation of a relationship with that person more likely.
Cate et al asked 337 individuals to assess their current relationships in terms of reward level and satisfaction. Results showed that reward level was superior to all other factors in determining relationship satisfaction. But a basic problem with the reward/need theory is it only explores the receiving of rewards. Hays found that we gain satisfaction from giving as well as receiving.
Rosenbaum suggested that dissimilarity rather than similarity is the more Important factor in determining whether a relationship will work. This dissimilarity-repulsion hypothesis has been tested in different cultures such as Singapore by Singh and tan and the USA by drigotas. These studies found ppts were first attracted to each other because of similarity of attitudes and as they got to know each other, those who discovered more dissimilarities than similarities became less attracted to each other.
