Page 396 - The Social Animal

378 The Social Animal

and King George III of England. Lynn goes back to her dorm and
tells her roommate that she just met a wonderful, intelligent woman.
Literally dozens of tightly controlled experiments by Donn Byrne
and his associates have shown that, if all you know about a person
are his or her opinions on several issues, the more similar those opin-
ions are to yours, the more you like the person. 44
Why is agreement attractive? There are at least two major rea-
sons. First, it is obvious to most of us that people who share our at-
titudes and opinions on important issues are uncommonly
intelligent, thoughtful individuals. It is always rewarding and inter-
esting to hang out with intelligent and thoughtful people. Second,
they provide us with a kind of social validation for our beliefs—that
is, they provide us with the feeling that we are right. This is reward-
ing; hence, we like people who agree with us.
Moreover, we humans are so certain of the relationship between
attitude similarity and liking that if we happen to like someone for
some irrelevant reason—we both share an interest in birdwatching,
say —we will assume that his or her important attitudes must be sim-
ilar to ours.Thus, causality works in both directions: All other things
being equal, we like people whose attitudes are similar to ours, and
if we like someone, we attribute attitudes to him or her that are sim-
ilar to ours. 45

Liking, Being Liked, and Self-Esteem

There is still another reason why we tend to like people who hold
opinions similar to ours. When we learn that someone shares our
opinions, we are inclined to believe he or she will really like us if and
46
when that person gets to know us. And, as it turns out, one of the
most powerful determinants of whether we will like another person
is whether the other person indicates that he or she likes us. 47
What’s more, merely believing that someone likes you can initi-
ate a spiraling series of events that promotes increasingly positive
feelings between you and the other person. How does this work? To
illustrate, imagine that you and I engaged in a brief, rather unevent-
ful conversation at a party after a mutual friend introduced us to each
other. A few days later, you run into our friend on campus, and she
informs you that, following the party, I had some very complimen-