Need to Belong: A Fundamental Human Motive

• Human infants are equipped with reflexes that orient them toward people

  • Uniquely responsive to human faces

  • Turn their heads toward voices

  • Able to mimic certain facial gestures on cue

• People are social beings - people need people

• The need to belong is a basic human motive

• We care deeply what others think of us

• Social Anxiety Disorder: A disorder characterized by intense feelings of discomfort in situations that invite public scrutiny

• People who have a network of close social ties have higher self-esteem and greater satisfaction with life compared to those who live more isolated lives

• People who are socially connected rather than isolated are physically healthier and less likely to die a premature death

• The larger your online social network is, the ore people there are to view your status updates and the more socially connected you are likely to feel

The Thrill of Affiliation

• Need for Affiliation: A desire to establish social contact with others

• Individuals differ in the strength of their need for affiliation

• Stress can strongly arouse our need for affiliation

• An external threat triggers fear and motivates us to affiliate, particularly with others who face a similar threat

• Utility Theory: Stress sparks the desire to affiliate only when being with others is seen as useful in reducing the negative impact of the stressful situation

• People facing an imminent threat seek each other out in order to gain cognitive clarity about the danger they’re in

• Being alone and feeling lonely motivates people of all ages to connect with others in order to satisfy a reaffiliation motive

• Individuals who lack power and influence feel a need to seek out other people

The Agony of Loneliness

• Shyness is a common characteristic

• People who are extremely shy develop a pattern of risk avoidance that can set them up for unpleasant and unrewarding interactions

• Shyness can arise from different sources

  • May stem from an inborn personality trait

  • May develop as a learned reaction to failed interactions

• Not all shy infants grow up to become inhibited adults, but there is some continuity

• People who are shy exhibit greater activity in the amygdala (brain region responsible for fear processing) when exposed to pictures of strangers

Consequences of shyness

• Shy people evaluate themselves negatively, expect to fail in their social encounters, and blame themselves when they do

• Many shy people go into self-imposed isolation, which often makes them feel lonely

• Problem stems from a paralyzing fear of rejection

• People who fear rejection think that their friendly or romantic interest is transparent to others, which leads them to back off

Loneliness

• Loneliness: A feeling of deprivation about existing social relations

• Intimate loneliness: When someone wants but does not have a spouse, significant other, or best friends to rely on for emotional support, especially during personal crises

• Relational loneliness: When someone wants but does not have friendships from school and work and family connections

• Collective loneliness: When someone wants but does not have remote relationships and social identities derived from alumni and clubs

  • The more voluntary associations we have, the lower one’s collective loneliness

• Most people feel lonely at some point in life

  • Brief loneliness motivates a need for reaffiliation

  • Prolonged loneliness triggers a range of physical and mental health problems

• Loneliness can take shape in different ways from one culture to the next

  • Hikikomori: A form of social withdrawal that affects a significant number of young adults in Japan

    • Characterized by a full withdrawal from intimate relationships outside of the family

    • Those afflicted don’t attend school or have jobs

    • Spend much of their time isolated at home

    • Don’t appear to suffer from depression or other psychological disorders

    • Share histories of parental rejection, family disruption, and peer bullying and rejection

  • People in collectivist cultures are at a high risk for loneliness, relative to Westerners

• Anyone can feel lonely at any time and any place

• How do people combat loneliness?

  • Try harder to be friendly to other people

  • Take their mind off the problem by reading or watching TV

  • Try extra hard to succeed at another aspect of life

  • Stay busy at other activities

  • Seek new ways to meet people

  • Talk to someone about the problem

  • Use alcohol or drugs to wash away feelings of loneliness

The Initial Attraction

• People are attracted to those with whom they can have a relationship that is rewarding

  • Provide us with attention, support, money, status, information, and other valuable resources

  • Feels good to be with someone who is beautiful, smart, or funny, or who happens to be in our presence when times are good

• Each of us is attracted to others we see as being both able and willing to fulfill our various relationship needs

• Human beings exhibit patterns of attraction and male selection that favor the conception, birth, and survival of their offspring

• Online dating is still relatively new

• Benefits of online dating

  • Exposure and access to large numbers of profiles of potential romantic partners

  • A means of communicating through email, IM, and live chat via webcams

  • A matching “algorithm” that brings together users who are likely to be attracted to one another

Familiarity: Being There

• The vast majority of potential partners live far away, but people are most likely to become attracted to someone they’ve seen and become familiar with

The Proximity Effect

• The single best predictor of whether two people will get together is physical proximity / nearness

• Where we live influences the friends we make

The Mere Exposure Effect

• Proximity increases frequency of contact

• Mere Exposure Effect: The phenomenon whereby the more often people are exposed to a stimulus, the more positively they evaluate that stimulus

• The more often people saw a novel stimulus, the more they came to like it

• The mere exposure effect can influence us without our awareness

• Familiarity breeds attraction

• Familiarity can even influence self-evaluations

Physical Attractiveness: Getting Drawn In

• Beautiful faces capture our attention

• Group Attractiveness Effect: The perceived physical attractiveness of a group as a whole is greater than the average attractiveness of its individual members

What is Beauty?

• Certain faces are inherently more attractive, on average, than others

  • Smooth skin

  • Pleasant expression

  • Youthfulness

• People tend to agree about what constitutes an attractive body

  • Hourglass figure in women

  • V-shaped physique in men

  • Tall men

• People like averaged faces because they are more proportionally face-like and have features that are less distinctive, so they seem more familiar to us

• People are drawn to faces that are symmetrical

  • Associated with biological health, fitness, and fertility

• Babies also show a preference for attractive faces

• Other social psychologists believe that physical attractiveness is subjective

  • Individuals differ a great deal in their private preferences

  • People from different cultures enhance their beauty in very different ways

  • Differences in preferences found in cultures and racial groups

    • Some cultures find women with tubular shapes as more attractive

    • White Americans care more about the weight of females when judging attractiveness than Black Americans do

  • Standards of beauty change over time

  • Our perceptions of someone’s beauty can be inflated or deflated by various circumstances

    • People often see others as more physically attractive if they have nonphysical qualities that make them likable

    • Color can affect attractiveness (ex: red and sex)

Why are we blinded by beauty?

• People who are seen as physically attractive are at a social advantage

• It is inherently rewarding to be in the company of people who are aesthetically appealing

• What-is-beautiful-is-good Stereotype: The belief that physically attractive individuals also possess desirable personality characteristics

  • In movies, the more attractive the characters were, the more frequently they were portrayed as virtuous, romantically active, and successful

  • The entertainment industry helps to perpetuate our tendency to judge people by their physical appearance

• Beauty is not related to objective measures of important traits such as intelligence, personality, adjustment, or self-esteem

• Each of us creates support for the bias via a self-fulfilling prophecy model

The Benefits and Costs of Beauty

• Highly attractive people can’t always tell if the attention and praise they receive from others is due to their talent or just their good looks

  • Feedback is sometimes hard to interpret

• Pressure to maintain one’s appearance

  • An obsession with thinness can give rise to serious eating disorders

  • Young women who see magazine ads or TV commercials that feature ultra-thin models become more dissatisfied with their own bodies than those who view neutral materials

  • The cultural ideal for thinness may get set in childhood

• Little relationship between youthful appearance and later happiness

First Encounters: Getting Acquainted

Liking Others who are Similar

• People tend to associate with others who are similar to themselves

• It’s the mere perception of similarity that draws people together

• Demographic

  • Sharing the same race, ethnic background, age, religion, level of education, and occupation

  • People who go together tend to resemble each other more than randomly paired couples

  • People who share in demographics liked each other more than those who were dissimilar

  • People form social niches that are homogeneous and divided along the lines of demographic groups

• Attitudes

  • Sharing the same opinions, interests, and values

  • People have to get to know each other first

  • Participants like other people better when they perceive their attitudes as being similar

  • Dissimilarity triggers repulsion (the desire to avoid someone)

  • We avoid associating with others who are dissimilar, and among those who remain, we are drawn to those who are most similar

• Matching Hypothesis: The proposition that people are attracted to others who are similar in physical attractiveness

  • Men and women on online dating sites tended to contact and be contacted by others whose relative popularity on the site was similar to their own

  • People tend to shy away from making romantic pursuits with others who seem out of their league

• Similarity in subjective experience

  • I-sharing: When two people at a common event bond over reactions, they feel as though they’ve shared a subjective experience

  • People who I-share, even if they’re otherwise dissimilar, feel a profound sense of connection to one another

• Complementarity Hypothesis: People seek others whose needs oppose their own

  • No support for this view

  • Complementarity doesn’t make for compatible attraction

  • While opposites may seem exotic at first glance, over time the differences become difficult to negotiate

Liking Others who Like Us

• People prefer relationships that are psychologically balanced

• A state of imbalance caused distress

• We want to like the friends of our friends and the enemies of our enemies

• We don’t expect our friends and enemies to get along

• Reciprocity: A mutual exchange between what we give and what we receive

  • We tend to like others who indicate that they like us

• People like others more when their affection takes time to earn than when it comes easy

• People are drawn to members of the opposite sex who like them, but only when these others are selective and discriminating

Pursuing Those who are Hard to Get

• We like those who are socially selective

• Hard-to-get Effect: The tendency to prefer people who are highly selective in their social choices over those who are more readily available

• We are turned off by those who reject us because they are committed to someone else or have no interest in us

• We tend to prefer people who are moderately selective compared with those who are non-selective or too selective

  • Non-selective - having poor taste or low standards

  • Too selective - having very high taste

• Individuals differ a great deal in terms of how selective they are

  • People who fear being single set lower standards, are less selective, and tolerate lesser relationships

  • The fear of being single leads people to settle for less desirable partners

• Psychological Reactance: The proposition that people are highly motivated to protect their freedom to choose and behave as they please

  • People reassert themselves, often by wanting that which is unavailable too much

  • People of the opposite sex were seen as more attractive as the night wore on

  • Closing time posed a threat, which sparked desire, only to those on the lookout for a late-night date

Mate Selection: The Evolution of Desire

• Most men appear to be more sex-driven than most women

Mate Selection Preferences

• Human beings all over the world exhibit mate-selection patterns that favor the conception, birth, and survival of their offspring

• Women must be highly selective because they are biologically limited in the number of children they can bear and raise in a lifetime

  • Must protect her children

  • Searches for a mate who possesses (or has the potential to possess) economic resources and is willing to commit those resources to support her offspring

  • Women should be attracted to men who are older and financially secure or who have ambition and other traits predictive of future success

• Men can father an unlimited number of children and can ensure their reproductive success by inseminating many women, and are mainly focused on being certain that the babies being born are actually their own

  • Men seek out women who are young and physically attractive, attributes that signal health and reproductive fertility

  • Men should favor chastity, pursuing women they think will be sexually faithful

• When mate seekers can’t have it all and must focus on what’s important, they prioritize their choices in the ways predicted by evolutionary theory

• Universal tendency for men to seek younger women (who are most likely to be fertile) and for women to desire older men (who are most likely to have financial resources)

  • Men in their thirties seek out women who are 5 years younger

  • Men in their fifties prefer women 10 to 20 years younger

  • Girls and women of all ages are attracted to men who are older than they are

  • Teenage boys say they are most attracted to women who are slightly older than they are, women in their fertile twenties

  • The older men were, the more they wanted increasingly younger women

  • Women of all ages were more likely to seek out status information and men who were older

• In the US, the mate preferences predicted by evolutionary theory persist throughout the lifespan

Conspicuous Consumption

• May have evolves as a sexually selected mating signal

• Men flaunt their resources to attract women

Expressions of Love

• Male and female stereotypes would suggest that men are more likely to chase sex and women seek love

• When asked who “gets serious” first, 84% chose women

• 62% reported that the man said “I love you” first

• Expression of love - how happy are they when the disclosure comes before sex compared to after?

  • Prior to sexual activity, men reported feeling happier and more positive about the expression of love than women did

  • Presex confession may signal interest in advancing a relationship to include sexual activity

  • After sexual activity, women reacted with somewhat more positive emotion

  • A postsex confession may more accurately signal a desire for long-term commitment

Jealousy

• Jealousy: A negative emotional state that arises from a perceived threat to one’s relationship

• Common and normal human reaction

• A man should be most upset by sexual infidelity because a wife’s extramarital affair increases the risk that the children he supports aren’t his own

• A women should feel more threatened by emotional infidelity because a husband who falls in love with another woman might leave and withdraw his financial support

• Jealousy reactions are intensified among people who believe that there is a scarcity of potential mates

• Men were more likely to accuse their partners of sexual infidelity

• Women were more likely to accuse their partners of emotional infidelity

• Jealous men were more likely to report that their rival had greater status / resources

• Jealous women were more likely to report that their rival was younger / more attractive

Sociocultural Perspectives

• Women trade youth and beauty for money not for reproductive purposes but rather because they often lack direct access to economic power

• The more economic power women had, the more important male physical attractiveness was to them

• Men get more upset over sexual infidelity not because of uncertain paternity but because they reasonably assume that a married woman who has a sexual affair is also likely to have intimate feelings for her extramarital partner

• Although men and women react differently when asked to imagine a partner’s sexual or emotional infidelity, they are equally more upset by emotional infidelity when asked to recall actual experiences from a past relationship

• Self-report differences typically found between the sexes are small compared to the similarities

  • Women desire physical attractiveness as much as men do when asked about what they want in a short-term casual sex partner

• Does the stated preference reported match the actual preferences found in face-to-face interactions?

  • In practice, their attraction to each other was based on similar characteristics

• Sex differences often observed are neither predictable nor universal

Close Relationships

• Intimate Relationships: A close relationship between two adults involving emotional attachment, fulfillment of psychological needs, or interdependence

• Three basic components

  • Feelings of attachment, affection, and love

  • Fulfillment of psychological needs

  • Interdependence between partners, each of whom has a meaningful influence on the other

• Not all intimate relationships contain all three ingredients

• Empty Shell Marriage: A marriage that revolves around coordinated daily activities, but emotional attachment is weak and psychological needs go unmet

• Relationships progress in order through a series of stages

• Stimulus-Value-Role Theory

  • Stimulus Stage: Attraction is sparked by external attributes such as physical appearance

  • Value Stage: Attachment is based on similarity of values and beliefs

  • Role Stage: Commitment is based on the enactment of such roles as husband and wife

• Most researchers don’t believe that intimate relationships progress through a fixed sequence of stages

• Love depends on the experience of positive emotions in the presence of a partner

• As the rewards pile up, love develops

• As rewards diminish, love erodes

The Intimate Marketplace: Tracking the Gains and Losses

Social Exchange Theory

• Social Exchange Theory: A perspective that views people as motivated to maximize benefits and minimize costs in their relationships with others

• Relationships that provide more rewards and fewer costs will be more satisfying and endure longer

• Dating couples who experience greater increases in rewards as their relationship progresses are more likely to stay together than are those who experience small increases or declines

• Both rewards and costs start to contribute to levels of satisfaction

• All people bring to a relationship certain expectations about the balance sheet to which they are entitled

• Comparison Level

  • A person with a high CL expects their relationships to be rewarding

  • Someone with a low CL doesn’t expect their relationships to be rewarding

  • Situations that meet or exceed a person’s expectations are more satisfying than those who fall short

• Comparison Level for Alternatives

  • People’s expectations about what they would receive in an alternative situation

  • If the rewards available elsewhere are believed to be high, a person will be less committed to staying in the present relationship

  • If people perceive that they have few acceptable alternatives, they will tend to remain, even in an unsatisfying relationship that fails to meet expectations

• People who are in love tend to see their partners and relationships through rose-colored glasses

• People in love tend to see other prospective partners as less appealing

• Investment: Something a person puts into a relationship that they cannot recover if the relationship ends

  • Investments increase commitment

  • Commitment levels predict how long relationships will last

  • The best-adjusted relationships are those in which each partner is committed and sees the other as mutually committed

  • People who are highly committed are more likely to forgive and forget when their partners betray the relationship norm

  • The investment model can be used to predict whether battered women will remain in an abusive relationship

Equity Theory

• Equity Theory: The theory that people are most satisfied with a relationship when the ratio between benefits and contributions is similar for both partners

• In an inequitable relationship, the balance is disturbed

  • The over-benefited partner receives more benefits than they deserve on the basis of contributions made

  • The under-benefited partner receives fewer benefits than deserved

• Both overbenefit and underbenefit are unstable and unhappy states

  • Underbenefited partners feel angry and resentful because they’re giving more than their partner for the benefits they receive

  • Overbenefited partners feel guilty because they’re profiting unfairly

• It is more unpleasant to feel underbenefited than overbenefited

• Any partner in a close relationship may feel a need to restore the balance when they are feeling insecure

• Trust-Insurance System: A natural, unconscious system employed by people in relationships in which they keep a tally of costs and benefits in order to detect and repair possible imbalances

  • On days after participants anxiously felt like they weren’t good enough for their partner, they were more likely to make sacrifices

  • Restorative actions were accompanied by lowered feelings of inferiority on the same day

  • On the next day, the partners who benefited from these actions expressed fewer doubts about their marriage

• Equilibrium Model of Relationship Maintenance

  • People are motivated to preserve important relationships

  • Declines in satisfaction and commitment motivate threat-mitigating tactics

  • These tactics serve to restore levels of satisfaction and commitment

Types of Relationships

Exchange and Communal Relationships

• Exchange Relationship: A relationship in which the participants expect and desire strict reciprocity in their interactions

  • People want costs to be quickly offset by compensation

• Communal Relationship: A relationship in which the participants expect and desire mutual responsiveness to each other’s needs

  • No regard for whether they have given or received a benefit

• TikTok Example: There is a subsection of TikTok where ladies make lunches for their partners. These TikToks sometimes stir up controversy.

  • Commenters often feel that women shouldn’t have to make lunches for their partners and ask OPs what their partner does for them. This represents an exchange relationship

  • OP usually responds that their partner doesn’t need to do anything for them

    • They like making the lunches

    • Their partner works and this is a way to provide

    • The partner has to wake up early and comes home late and this is a way to fill a need

    • Making lunches is how they show love

    • Etc etc

    • This is an example of a communal relationship

• Exchange relationships typically exist between strangers and casual acquaintances

• Strong communal relationships are usually limited to close friends, romantic partners, and family members

• Once a communal norm has been adopted in a relationship, the motivation to respond to the other’s needs becomes automatic

Secure and Insecure Attachment Styles

• Adults exhibit specific learned attachment styles in their romantic relationships

• Attachment Style: The way a person typically interacts with significant others

• Secure Attachment: When babies cry in distress when the mother leaves them and beams with delight when she returns

• Insecure Attachment

  • Avoidant-Insecure Attachment: When babies don’t react much when the mother leaves or when she returns

  • Anxious-Insecure Attachment: When babies cling and cry when the mother leaves and greets her with anger or apathy upon her return

• Infants form internal working models of attachment figures and these models guide their relationships later in life

  • Infants classified as securely attached are later more positive in their outlook toward others

  • Adult relationship patterns are predictable from parent-child relations in adolescence

• People who have a secure attachment style report having satisfying relationships that are happy, friendly, based on mutual trust, and enduring

• Avoidant lovers fear intimacy and believe that romantic love is doomed to fade

• Anxious lovers report a love life full of emotional highs and lows, obsessive preoccupation, and extreme sexual attraction and jealousy

• Our attachment styles can be seen in our everyday behavior

• People who are secure tend to have more lasting relationships

• Although styles of attachment are modestly stable over time, they are not fixed

How Do I Love Thee? Counting the Ways

• John Alan Lee

  • Three primary love styles

    • eros - erotic love

    • ludus - uncommitted love

    • storge - friendship love

  • Secondary love styles

    • mania - demanding and possessive love

    • pragma - pragmatic love

    • agape - altruistic love

  • Men tend to score higher than women on ludus

  • Women score higher on storge, mania, and pragma

• Triangular Theory of Love

  • There are eight basic subtypes of love, and all can be derived from the presence or absence of three components

  • Intimacy: The emotional component, which involves liking and feelings of closeness

  • Passion: The motivational component, which contains drives that trigger attraction, romance, and sexual desire

  • Commitment: The cognitive component, which reflects the decision to make a long-term commitment to a loved partner

• Passionate Love: Romantic love characterized by high arousal, intense attraction, and fear of rejection

• Companionate Love: A secure, trusting, stable partnership

Passionate Love

• Passionate love is fueled by two ingredients

  • A heightened state of physiological arousal

  • The belief that this arousal was triggered by the beloved person

• Can sometimes be hard to interpret

• Excitation Transfer: The process whereby arousal caused by one stimulus is added to arousal from a second stimulus and the combined arousal is attributed to the second stimulus

• Love at first fright

• Arousal, even without distress, intensifies emotional reactions, positive or negative

• Passionate love tends to diminish somewhat over time

  • Obsessional aspect of passionate love clearly diminishes in long-term relationships

  • A romantic aspect often endures

• For some people, the intense love of their long-term partner may last for long periods of time

Companionate Love

• Form of affection that binds close friends as well as lovers

• Less intense than passionate love

• Deeper and more enduring than passionate love

• Self-Disclosure: Revelations about the self that a person makes to others

• The willingness to disclose intimate facts and feelings lies at the heart of our closest and most intimate relationships

• The more emotionally involved people are in a close relationship, the more the self-disclose to each other

  • We disclose to people we like

  • We like people who disclose to us

  • We like people to whom we have disclosed

• Partners reveal more to each other as their relationship grows over time

• Social Penetration Theory: Relationships progress from superficial exchanges to more intimate ones

  • At first, people give relatively little of themselves to each other and receive little in return

  • Exchanges become

    • broader: covering more areas of their lives

    • deeper: involving more sensitive areas

• Patterns of self-disclosure change according to the state of a relationship

• Individuals differ in the tendency to share private, intimate thoughts with others

  • On average, women are more open than men

  • People in general are more self-disclosing to women than to men

  • Male friends seem to bond more by taking part in common activities

Culture, Attraction, and Close Relationships

• Physical attractiveness is more important to men all over the world

• Financial resources are more important to women all over the world

• In some countries, people valued chastity in a mate, but in others, chastity was either unimportant or negatively valued

• Passionate love is a widespread and universal emotion

• Romantic love is hardwired in the neurochemistry of the brain

  • Dopamine associated with highs of romantic passion

  • Also associated with the lows of rejection

  • Parallels between romantic love and substance addiction

Relationship Issues: The Male-Female Connection

Sexuality

• Reported sexual activity was more frequent and more varied than anyone had expected

  • Respondents may not be honest in their disclosures

  • People differ in their interpretations of survey questions

• Men view the world in more sexualized terms than women do

• Women tend to underperceive sex

• Men report being more promiscuous, more likely to think about sex, more permissive, and more likely to fantasize about sex with multiple partners

• Most men desire more sex partners and more sexual variety than most women do

Sexual Orientation

• Sexual Orientation: A person’s preference for members of the same sex (homosexuality), opposite sex (heterosexuality), or both sexes (bisexuality)

• An exclusive homosexual orientation is relatively rare among humans and other animals

  • 3-4% in men, 1.5-2% in women

• Homosexual behaviors are more common

• Sexual orientation should be seen alone a continuum

• Roots of homosexuality

  • Aristotle: Homosexuality is inborn, but strengthened by habit

  • Post-Freud psychoanalysts: Homosexuality stems from family dynamics, specifically a child’s overattachment to a parent of the same or opposite sex

  • Social Learning Theorists: Homosexuality stems from rewarding sexual experiences with same-sex peers in childhood

  • Little hard evidence to support these claims

• In male homosexual brains, the nucleus was half the size of male heterosexual brains and comparable to female heterosexual brains