Does (Dis)Similarity Information about a New Acquaintance Lead to Liking or Repulsion? An Experimental Test of a Classic Social Psychology Issue

Abstract

Decades of social psychology research has established the importance of similarity in leading to attraction. However, in response to early social psychology experiments demonstrating the similarity effect, Rosenbaum proposed the repulsion hypothesis, arguing that similarity does not lead to liking, but rather, dissimilarity leads to repulsion. Research to address whether dissimilarity carries more weight than similarity has generally involved participants’ reactions to sterile information about a bogus other whom they never meet. In contrast, in this study (N = 150), individuals first greeted another participant over Skype before they received manipulated (bogus) information on similarity or dissimilarity. In support of the similarity-attraction hypothesis, the two-step experimental design indicated that the participants in the similarity condition experienced an increase in liking and other positive reactions from before to after the receipt of the bogus similarity information. Participants in the dissimilarity condition, however, experienced no change (i.e., no repulsion effect).