Attitudes and attraction: A new test of the attraction, repulsion and similarity‐dissimilarity asymmetry hypotheses

Abstract

Dissimilarity and similarity between attitudes of the participants and a stranger were manipulated across two sets of issues to test the attraction, repulsion and similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry hypotheses. Participants (N = 192) judged social (liking, enjoyment of company) and intellectual (intelligence, general knowledge) attractiveness of the stranger. The similarity in the first set of attitudes x similarity in the second set of attitudes effect emerged in social attraction, but not in intellectual attraction. Stated simply, dissimilarity had a greater weight than similarity in social attraction, but equal weight in intellectual attraction. These results support the similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry hypothesis that predicts dissimilarity-repulsion to be stronger than similarity-attraction. However, they reject (1) the attraction hypothesis that dissimilarity and similarity produce equal and opposite effects on social attraction; and (2) the repulsion hypothesis that only dissimilar attitudes affect social attraction by leading to repulsion. An equal weighting of dissimilarity and similarity in intellectual attraction further suggested that the similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry on social attraction is reflective of a stronger avoidance response in the Darwinian sense.

The similarity–attraction relationship revisited: divergence between the affective and behavioral facets of attraction

“…The pattern of results obtained here with different kinds of measures provides further evidence in support of current attraction studies demonstrating that the negative effect of attitude dissimilarity is greater than the positive effect of attitude similarity, but only for social attraction responses (see recent studies by Singh & Ho, 2000;Singh & Teoh, 1999). In the present experiment, the weight of dissimilarity was greater than that of similarity only for behavioral attraction responses, where individuals felt more involved in the concerned social interaction.…”

Homophily and the Persistence of Disagreement

“…They find a positive (respectively negative) relationship between perceived cultural distance and interactions of for-eign students with co-nationals (respectively host nationals). Support to the idea that repulsion to others with dissimilar attitudes is the main mechanism shaping homophily can be found in Rosenbaum (1986) and Singh and Ho (2000).…”

Similarity predicts liking in 3-year-old children

“…Research findings on this issue with adults are mixed. Some findings suggest that similarity has a stronger influence on attraction than dissimilarity has on repulsion (e.g., Singh & Tan, 1992), whereas others suggest the opposite (e.g., Singh & Ho, 2000). Further exploration of this issue from a developmental perspective is another fruitful area for future research.…”