Interpersonal attraction: In search of a theoretical Rosetta Stone.

This chapter reviews theory and research on interpersonal attraction, a literature that dates back more than half a century. Although this literature has produced a wealth of empirical data, it also has lacked theoretical coherence. The present chapter takes two significant steps toward the theoretical unification of this literature. First, it identifies three metatheoretical perspectives—the domain-general reward perspective, the domain-specific evolutionary perspective, and the attachment perspective—that collectively account for the large majority of research findings on interpersonal attraction, and it reviews the literature from within that metatheoretical structure. At their core, all three of these perspectives emphasize the needs people bring to attraction contexts. Second, it suggests that the instrumentality principle—that people become attracted to others to the degree that those others help them achieve goals that are currently high in motivational priority—is the core, unifying principle underlying interpersonal attraction. According to this principle, people also become less attracted to others who are instrumental for a certain goal once people have made substantial progress toward achieving that goal, because people tend to shift their emphasis to other goals at that point. Indeed, because people’s motivational priorities can fluctuate rapidly, their attraction to a given target person, and their rank ordering of attraction to others in their social network, will also fluctuate. Interpersonal Attraction 3 Interpersonal Attraction: In Search of a Theoretical Rosetta Stone Research on interpersonal attraction has a checkered history. It flourished in the 1960s and 1970s before being largely eclipsed by research on established romantic relationships in the 1980s. As the 1990s approached, it reemerged in a barely recognizable form as a major prong of evolutionary psychology, which largely jettisoned the most central research questions from previous decades. Then, in the first decade of the 21 century, broad interest in interpersonal attraction reemerged, inspired in part by the power afforded by major dating innovations in the business world, including online dating and speed-dating. This reemergence not only built upon the flourishing literature deriving predictions from evolutionary principles, but it also revitalized topics that had been largely neglected for decades. Although we view the nascent reemergence of research on interpersonal attraction with enthusiasm, we fear that the status of this research domain remains precarious and vulnerable to supersession. The primary reason for this fear is that the interpersonal attraction literature, as a whole, lacks the theoretical depth and breadth to prevent it from flagging or splintering. This concern is not new. Indeed, scholars have long observed that theoretical disorganization has stunted the field’s development. In the beginning, Newcomb (1956, p. 575) observed that “there exists no very adequate theory of interpersonal attraction. ” Although the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a major surge of research on this topic, Berscheid (1985, p. 417) concluded from her review of that work that the field “‘just grew,’ proceeding without the advantage of a master plan. ” Finkel and Baumeister (2010, p. 421), reviewing the interpersonal attraction literature recently—a half-century after Newcomb and a quarter-century after Berscheid—echoed their sentiments, concluding that the field of interpersonal attraction research “remains a theoretical morass. ” As an illustration of this point, consider the organization of the extant integrative reviews of this literature. Such reviews tend to be built around one of two organizational structures. Several Interpersonal Attraction 4 reviews, including those presented in the major textbooks in the field (e.g., Berscheid & Regan, 2005; Bradbury & Karney, 2010; Miller, 2012), organize the literature around the fundamental principles of attraction, such as familiarity, reciprocity, similarity, and the allure of physical attractiveness. Other reviews organize the literature around the key predictors of attraction (e.g., Finkel & Baumeister, 2010; Simpson & Harris, 1994; see Kelley et al., 1983), typically categorizing them as most relevant to (i) the actor (characteristics of the person who experiences attraction), (ii) the target (characteristics of the person to whom the actor is attracted), (iii) the relationship (characteristics of the dyad above and beyond actor and partner characteristics), or (iv) the environment (characteristics of the physical or social environment). Both of these organizational structures have value, but neither is especially theoretical. Our goal in the present chapter is to take a step toward the theoretical integration of the interpersonal attraction literature. We seek to do so in two ways. First, we suggest that almost all research on interpersonal attraction has been implicitly or explicitly guided by one of three overarching metatheoretical perspectives—domain-general reward perspectives, domain-specific evolutionary perspectives, and attachment perspectives—and we use this tripartite theoretical structure to review the attraction literature. Second, we argue that this literature coheres around a single core principle, the instrumentality principle, which suggests that people become attracted to others who help them achieve needs or goals that are currently high in motivational priority. Domain-general reward perspectives emphasize people’s fundamental needs (e.g., pleasure, belonging, self-esteem, consistency) that are relevant to diverse life domains (e.g., friendship, work, family, mating). In principle, people can satisfy these needs through diverse nonsocial and social means, including through romantic relationships. For example, people’s need to maintain a positive self-view can be satisfied by acing an exam (i.e., nonsocial means) or by receiving a compliment from a friend (i.e., nonromantic social means), and it can also be satisfied by a Interpersonal Attraction 5 spouse’s sexual overtures (i.e., romantic social means). In contrast, domain-specific evolutionary perspectives emphasize that people possess specific needs that were linked to reproductive success in humans’ ancestral past, and these specific needs can be met only through specific means. For example, people’s need to reproduce can be satisfied (in a long-term context) by their spouse exhibiting sexual attraction toward them, but not by having their friend compliment them or by acing an exam. Finally, attachment perspectives, which are still in their infancy vis-à-vis understanding interpersonal attraction, are built upon the idea that humans are motivated to approach attachment figures in times of distress in an attempt to reestablish a sense of security (Bowlby, 1969). Some elements of the attachment perspective are reminiscent of the domaingeneral perspective, such as the need for contact comfort, which applies in both parental and mating relationships (Harlow, 1958), yet other elements are reminiscent of the domain-specific perspective, such as the initiation of particular behavioral and physiological patterns (e.g., distress) in response to particular environmental cues (e.g., loss of an attachment figure; Sbarra & Hazan, 2008). Chronologically, the domain-general reward perspective has guided research since scholars began studying interpersonal attraction in the middle of the 20 century, the domain-specific evolutionary perspective came to prominence in the late 1980s, and the attachment perspective emerged in the early 1990s and has picked up steam over the past several years. Finally, after concluding our review of the attraction literature, we argue that the instrumentality principle can serve as the central, unifying principle for the interpersonal attraction literature—a theoretical Rosetta Stone. In building this argument, we offer a selective tour through classic and current perspectives on motivation and motivated cognition. In addition, we suggest that the instrumentality principle is more precise, more empirically tractable, more theoretically generative, and more integrative than the reward principle. Section I: A Review of the Interpersonal Attraction Literature Interpersonal Attraction 6 Domain-General Reward Perspectives From the inception of psychological research investigating interpersonal attraction, the single most influential idea has been that people are attracted to others to the degree that those others are rewarding for them. Indeed, Newcomb (1956, p. 577) asserted that “we acquire favorable or unfavorable attitudes toward persons as we are rewarded or punished by them. ” Influential scholars frequently echoed this view in the subsequent heyday of research on initial attraction, asserting, for example, that “we like people most whose overall behavior is most rewarding” (Aronson, 1969), that “individuals like those who reward them” (Walster, 1971), and that liking emerges from “the rewards others provide” (Levinger & Snoek, 1972). This view remains dominant today, as illustrated by the assertion, in the interpersonal attraction chapter in a current best-selling textbook on social relationships, that the rewards people experience in the presence of others are “the fundamental basis of attraction” to those others (Miller, 2012, p. 70). Much of the research on interpersonal attraction has revolved around a handful of the domaingeneral needs people can seek to satisfy through interpersonal processes, both romantic and platonic. Because the satisfaction of these needs is rewarding, scholars’ explicit or implicit recognition of these needs has influenced their conceptualizations of how interpersonal attraction works. We organize our review of domain-general reward perspectives around five such needs: hedonic pleasure, self-esteem, belonging, consistency, and self-expansion. This review is intended to be n