Interpersonal Attraction and Repeated Exposure to Rewarders and Punishers

Abstract

An experiment was conducted in an effort to clarify the nature of the relationship between frequency of exposure and interpersonal at traction. Subjects were visually exposed to one another during each trial of a modified prisoner's dilemma game in which subjects' out comes were controlled by the experimenter. The frequency of these visual encounters was varied, as was the nature of the monetary outcomes from the gaming trials (rewards vs. punishments) and the attribution of re sponsibility for these outcomes (partners responsible vs. non-responsi ble). Measures of attraction indicated that, overall, more frequently viewed others were preferred to those less frequently seen. This ex posure effect was most strongly obtained when the other subjects were viewed as personally responsible for delivering rewards, while either no effect or a weak negative exposure effect was found in the responsible- punish condition.