Do Opposites Attract? Essay Example

subjects had completed their booklet they were given the necessary information about the next meeting. Experimenters went to work classifying strong personalities into groups with weaker and neutral personalities. One week later all subjects were called back and presented another booklet. This time their task was to meet with an assigned person of the same sex and have a conversation related to the interests of that subject and the other person.

After the eight minute session each person filled out another booklet “forming an opinion about the stranger. ” This opinion rated two questions from 1-7 emphasizing the attitude (affect) toward the stranger, “like-dislike, comfortable-uncomfortable” and the ability to work with him/her. To protect the experiment as well as the subjects all personal information was confidential. The results showed that, as predicted, similar attitudes had a greater effect on the subjects and their attraction concerning the stranger.

In simpler terms this means that people in this experiment had a greater attraction and liking towards strangers who shared something in common with themselves and felt more “comfortable” with the stranger. Experiment number two was performed on 96 people from the same college and age group, including 48 women and 48 men. The goal of this experiment was to investigate attraction with cognitive evaluation or intelligence; however, the two setbacks were obtaining non-discriminating information an interpretation of each subject.

Measuring inferred attraction and cognitive similarity is tricky due to the influence they have on each other based on the time of the survey. For example a person is more likely to give a sympathetic “kinder” answer if he/she is feeling good that day rather than telling how he feels because

she is in a bad mood due to unrelated circumstances. Just like the first experiment, subject’s identification was kept confidential and meeting between strangers had an eight minute interval in which each subject was judged on general knowledge and overall appearance intelligence.

The results for this experiment measuring attraction based upon intelligence and overall knowledge and cognition showed that subjects showed more attraction to people similar to themselves. Those who were marked intelligent bonded well with others of the same knowledge base. However, those who were described highly intelligent marked their fellow subjects harsher, which may have been because of personality cues. Those found unintelligent and “lacking knowledge” had a lower standard for those marked mid intelligent, making them appear to be very intelligent on the 1-7 scale.

The experiment I have just explained is not the only one that has been conducted on the measurement of intelligence and similarity on attraction. The same experiment with the same methods was done in the United States. Results coordinated very well to this experiment, making this experiment a success, but not necessarily a fact. What makes this experiment unique is that it wasn’t romantically based on attraction. The goal was to view how everyday people see, feel, and think about people different from them and similar to them. No romantic interests were implied.

Although I thought this experiment was interesting I believe that the dependent variables were inconclusive. For example measuring a person’s actual intelligence is hard without proven performance. None of the subjects were given a test measuring how intelligent they really are, which can skew the results and give false appearance. The results suggested to me that people

aren’t attracted to people who are knowledgeable, but people who can talk like they are knowledgeable. The independent variables should have been based on tests of intelligence instead of the opinions of strangers.

Confidentiality in the experimental method is another thing that was questionable. Unfortunately people are judgmental and in this experiment there were no walls between strangers, meaning they could see each other. This could have elicited strong first impressions by what the stranger looked like or how he dressed that could skew the results by first impression alone. The second independent variable seemed inconclusive to me. Although the experiment’s goal was to measure similarity, they also wanted to measure similarity based on attitude and the effect of mood.

According to the scientific method in this experiment the dependent variable is similarity and attraction which should be the fixation on getting results. Throwing in the effect of mood wen measuring attitude was not needed. Results of this study didn’t surprise me, I never believed the age old saying “opposites attract,” because through personal experience I have learned and observed that people who are similar tend to get along better. Those who are different as the night and day seem to have more fights and arguments. This statement brings up a whole new hypothesis based question brought out by the University of Singapore study.