Social psychology Essay

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Social Psychology
Homework Chapter 9 1. Give two reasons for why we prefer company than being alone.
Need for affiliation is a desire to establish social contact with others. Affiliating can satisfy us, as others provide energy, attention, stimulation, information and emotional support. People need other people- to celebrate with, share news with, commiserate with, talk to, learn from and not feel lonely.
Another condition that strongly arouses our need for affiliation is stress (only when being with others is seen as useful in reducing the negative impact of the stressful situation). People tend to seek for cognitive clarity (information, experience etc) about the danger they are in. 2. Describe the two effects that explain attraction.
The proximity effect means that people may get together because of physical proximity or nearness. Nowadays people often interact at remote distances (via phone, e-mails, social networks etc.). However, the most important social interactions still occur among people who find themselves in the same place at the same time. For example, we are more likely to date someone who lives nearby than far away.
The mere exposure effect means that the more often people see something or someone-the more they come to like it. People don’t even have to be aware of their prior exposures for this effect to occur. For example, the experiment with 4 women attending classes. One didn’t attend any, other attended 5, 10 or 15 times. Then students rated each woman on various traits. In the result, the more classes a woman attended, the more attracted the students were to her. 3. What accounts for what we find to be beautiful or attractive faces?
First, people tend to evaluate others similarly regardless of their own level of attractiveness (how high or low others evaluated their own level of attractiveness).
Second, some of researchers have identified physical features that are associated with ratings of attractiveness, such as smooth skin, a pleasant expression and youthfulness. Third, people like faces in which the eyes, nose, lips etc are not too different from the average. Forth, studies also show that people are drawn to faces that are symmetrical (right and left sides line up and mirror each other).
In addition, differences in preference also been found among racial groups within a given culture (we may prefer people with features that are typical for our group). 4. Does playing hard to get make you more attractive? Explain!
Hard-to-get effect is a tendency to prefer people who are highly selective in their choices over those who are more readily available. Hard to get make you more attractive. There is a study that illustrates this point. Researches arranged for 10 female and male students to have speed dates, then go to website to rate all partners and
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