Interpersonal attractiveness — the reasons why different people rate each other as more or less attractive.
Interpersonal attractiveness doesn’t negate the general psychology of attractiveness in any way, but adds many new interesting points to it. Unlike personal attractiveness, which refers to «attractiveness in general,» interpersonal attractiveness refers to attractiveness between two specific people. If you like in general and many, because of this, you just might not like a particular person …
The main factors here are usually:
- Physical attractiveness. At the verbal level, people often say that it is not very important to them, not the most important, but research on real behavior shows that physical attractiveness comes first, not only at the first meeting, but also in subsequent ones.
- Territorial proximity. More precisely, not the territorial proximity itself, but the frequency with which the paths of two people intersect. Most people find their friends among neighbors, colleagues or classmates.
- similarity. Mutual sympathy is favored by the similarity of attitudes, beliefs, moral values, and even the similarity of voice intonations. The kinship of souls leads to mutual sympathy; opposites rarely meet.
- Love is like a passion. Love is not just strong sympathy. Most of us know people we really like but don’t like, and some of us have even felt passionately attracted to someone we didn’t particularly like.
- Bright. While one usually likes what is known, understandable, familiar, in interpersonal attractiveness it is important to stand out among the “passed the filter understandable”. If most women are trying to attract attention — to themselves, you can stand out just by being sincerely interested in the interlocutor and putting the focus not on yourself, but on him.
- Profitable. Direct or indirect benefits that a person can receive from another person is the strongest attractiveness factor. If contact with this person raises our status or at least self-esteem, if there is fun next to him or there are many other useful people around him — such people are more interesting to us than those with whom communication does not give any joys and prospects. In fact, this is a huge class of very different things — we are pleased with those who like us, we are drawn to those with whom it is delicious to kiss …
- Rovnya. We are uncomfortable with those who are much above us culturally or intellectually, just as we do not want to be around those who are completely below us. Usually people choose their equal. At the same time, smart people are looking for an equal that would be a little higher than him, people with a more problematic psyche — after all, so that there is someone a little lower than him nearby …
- Good investment. And we also like those in which we invested in something bright and kind. As Leo Tolstoy wrote: “We love people not so much for the good they have done us, but for the good we have done for them.”
People choose friends with voices similar to their own, American scientists found out, whose article was published in a scientific journal.
They came to this conclusion in the course of a study in which several dozen women and men, as well as their friends, became participants.
Scientists were able to establish that certain acoustic signals, characteristic of the voice of the person himself, are a kind of “signal” for finding friends.
So, a person is more likely to make friends with such people who have the same at least some of the «signals».