Lecture 10B: Personality and Social Interaction Flashcards
What are the three mechanisms of social interaction?
Personality interacts with situations in three ways:
- Selection (what kind of people we select based on personality)
- Evocation (our personality elicits certain responses from other)
- Manipulation (tactics of social influence used to
What is selection?
- Personality characteristics of others influence whether we select them as friends, dates or mates
- Our personality characteristics play role in kinds of situations we select to enter and stay in
What did the study on desirable personality characteristics in a marriage partner find?
- Over 10,000 participants, from 37 samples in 33 countries, six continents, five islands (Buss et al., 1990)
- Activity Instructions: evaluate the importance of various factors in choosing mate (range from 0 – unimportant to 3 – indispensible)
- Mutual attraction/love is the most favored characteristic
- Beyond love, top choices were personality characteristics (dependable character, emotional stability, pleasing disposition)
What is assortative mating?
- People are married to people who are similar to themselves
- Couples show positive correlation on a variety of features, both physical (e.g., height, earlobe length!) and personality traits
- Are these positive correlations caused by active selection of mates who are similar, or by-products of other causes (e.g., sheer proximity)?
How did Botwin et al (1997) study dating and married couples?
- Correlated preferences for Big 5 personality characteristics desired in a potential mate, and person’s own personality characteristics
- Correlations are consistently positive: Positive correlations between own personality and ideal partner personality are due, in part, to direct social preferences, based on personality characteristics of those doing the selecting
- Correlations between preferences for ideal personality characteristics in a mate and the actual personality characteristics of an obtained mate
- Consistently (modest, but) positive correlations: People seem to get mates they want in terms of personality
What is a romantic ideal?
- Romantic ideals: how close is the person you’re with to your ideal mate? The closer they are the higher the level of relationship satisfaction
- From nice to passive- overtime nice becomes passive and annoying because they are always accommodating you and you don’t get to know them. Leads to dissolution
- From strong to stubborn- you want someone with a strong personality but they become difficult to live with because they are unwilling to compromise and change
- From funny to flaky- want someone with a sense of humour and excitement but over time funny tends to turn into immature, lack of responsibility and they lack seriousness.
- From outgoing to over the top- desirable to be with someone social and outgoing but over time it becomes difficult because they talk too much, don’t relax, always on the go
- From caring to clingy- desire to have a caring and supportive mate but over time can become suffocating
But are people who get what they want happier with their marriage than those who don’t?
- People are especially happy if they are married to partners high on agreeableness, emotional stability, openness
- “honeymoon effect” (see them as higher in these desirable traits art first, but over time these drop. If they drop quickly, divorce is more likely)
What is the violation desire theory?
- According to violation of desire theory (Buss, 1994), break-ups should be more common when one’s desires are violated than when they are fulfilled
- People actively seek mates who are dependable and emotionally stable, and those who fail to choose such mates are at risk for divorce
- Those who fail to get what they want—including a mate who is similar—tend to selectively break up more often than those who get what they want
What are some examples of how personality affects the situations we select?
Personality affects situations to which people are exposed through selective entry into, or avoidance of, certain activities
- Empathy and community volunteering
- Psychoticism and spontaneous, volatile situations
- Shyness and avoidance of interactions
What is evocation?
- Once we select other to occupy our social environment, second class of processes set into motion- evocation of reactions from others and evocation of our reaction by others (This is unintentional).
- Personality characteristics of others evoke responses in us
- Our personality characteristics evoke responses in others
How does aggression evoke hostility?
- Aggressive people evoke hostility from others
- Hostile attributional bias: tendency to infer hostile intent on the part of others in the face of uncertain behaviour from others (lab studies)
- Because they expect others to be hostile, aggressive people treat others aggressively - people treated aggressively tend to aggress back
- Thus, hostility from others is evoked by an aggressive person
How does the evocation of anger and upset work between partners?
- Person can perform actions that evoke emotional response in the partner (direct response)
- Person can elicit actions from the partner that upset the original elicitor (indirect repsone)
a. Not necessarily doing anything wrong, but your lack of action upsets the partner
Describe the study by Buss (1991) on the role of personality on evocation of anger and upset in married couples
- Assessed personality characteristics of husbands and wives
- Strongest predictors of upset are low agreeableness and emotional instability
What is expectancy confirmation?
People’s beliefs about personality characteristics of others cause them to evoke in others actions that are consistent with initial beliefs
What did Snyder and Swan find about expectancy confirmation?
People’s beliefs led them to behave in an aggressive manner toward an unsuspecting target, then the target behaved in a more aggressive manner, confirming initial beliefs
