In this video I consider why we’re attracted to people and some of the factors that influence the relationships that we form. One major contributor is proximity, which refers to the fact that we tend to form relationships with people who are physically close to us; classmates, neighbors, & co-workers. Proximity alone isn’t enough and propinquity refers to the additional need to actually encounter these people. Frequent contact also relates to the mere–exposure effect, in which familiarity breeds liking. Lastly I describe homogamy, which refers to the fact that couples tend to have similar views and they also tend to grow more similar over time.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to consider attraction. Why is it that we’re attracted to some people? Why is it that we form relationships with some people and not others?

Now one simple answer to this question of why we form the relationships that we form is proximity. That is to say, we form relationships with people because they’re the people who are close to us. And if you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. It probably does explain a lot of your relationships. When you’re a child, your childhood friends are very likely to be the kids who live in the same neighborhood that you live in. Or they go to the same school that you go to, rather than kids who live 100 miles away. And when you’re in college you probably form friendships with people who live in the same dorm building that you live in, or people that go to the same classes that you go to. Even when you’re an adult, you’ll probably find yourself forming friendships and relationships with people who are your neighbors or people who work in the same office that you work in. And even when you reach old age you might find yourself forming friendships and forming relationships with the people who live in the same retirement community that you live in, the people who are physically close to you.

Now, of course, proximity is not the complete answer to this question of why we form the relationships that we form. In part this is because we also need to come into contact with people. Just because they’re physically close to us doesn’t mean we actually encounter them and so you can think about this if you live in an apartment building. There might be somebody who lives directly above you or directly below you and you actually spend a lot of hours physically very close to this person but you’re not actually encountering them. And there might be someone else who lives a little bit further away, maybe they live three or four doors down the same hallway, and yet you encounter that other person more often. You see them waiting for the elevator every morning, so you greet them, and you’re more likely to form some sort of relationship with this person because you’re encountering them more often, even though you might spend more time physically closer to the person who lives directly downstairs. And so to capture this distinction we use the term propinquity, and this refers to people that are near us but that we actually actually come into contact with. So it’s not just that they’re physically closer, it’s that we encounter them, we see them more often.

So this term propinquity refers to people who are close to us and who we come into contact with and this should remind you of something I talked about in a previous video which was on the mere–exposure effect. This is the idea that when something is more familiar to us, when we encounter it more often, we have a tendency to like it more. So this was demonstrated in some studies where people were exposed to Chinese characters, they couldn’t read Chinese, but if they were exposed to these characters more frequently they tended to like the characters more, they tended to think they were more positive words. This was also a part of the reason why we have advertising, right? Advertisers want to expose us to their products as much as possible so that later when we’re making a choice, we might not remember having seen that advertisement, but a certain product might feel more comfortable to us. We feel like we’d like it more, and that’s in part because we’re more familiar with it because of the presence of ads that we’ve seen before.

I also mentioned this applies to faces. So if we see a face of a person repeatedly, we tend to like that face more. And the really interesting thing is that this applies even to our own face. So how does that work well? If we show people pictures of themselves, one of which has been mirrored and the other which is the view that everybody else would see, people tend to prefer the mirror image version of themselves. The reason for this is that’s the version of us that we see most often. Every time you look in a mirror, you’re seeing a mirror image version of yourself and that’s not what everybody else sees when they see you. So if we were to ask you to pick of these two photos which one you prefer, you’d probably pick the mirror image. But if we ask your friends to pick which is a better picture of you; the mirror image or the normal version, your friends would probably pick the non-mirrored version. That’s because that’s the version of you that they see most often and that they’re more familiar with.

I think this can explain why people post things on social media and they often post mirrored versions of themself, of selfies, and they post the mirror version rather than the normal version that everybody else is used to seeing. And that’s probably because they think it looks better that way, whereas everybody else would actually probably disagree. Their friends would probably prefer to see the non-mirrored version.

Now the last thing we can consider in forming the relationships that we form is that we tend to form relationships with people with similar backgrounds and similar views. It doesn’t seem to be the case that opposites attract. When we look at long-term relationships we often find that people have similar partners and this is referred to as homogamy. And if we look at people who have been married for a long time, they tend to be very similar, and in fact they tend to grow more similar over time. So why is it that we form relationships with similar people?

Part of the reason is that when other people share our views, this provides a sort of affirmation that our views of the world are accurate and that they’re correct. They’re the right views to hold. It’s like “I’m not crazy, I’m not the only person with this view. Look, here’s somebody else who has the same views and that tells me my views are the correct ones. My views are accurate and they’re shared by other people. And so I’m going to be more likely to like those people. I’m going to feel a sense of liking towards those people with the same views as mine.” And this not only explains long-term relationships, where people tend to have similar views, but also our tendency to form like-minded groups and this is something that we’ll look at in more detail in a future video when we look at group relationships. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!