Hello and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
It has been a while.
I took some time off to do my final exams and I have officially finished my degree which is super exciting.
A little bit nerve wracking as well.
I think next week I really want to do an episode on the psychology of life transitions because I think it would be quite interesting to discuss especially as I prepare to move cities, say goodbye to Canberra, start my new job, all of those things.
It feels like adulthood is really beginning and it's a period, it's pretty full of nostalgia for my first year self, excitement, nerves.
But that's next week.
For this week's episode I'm pulling something from the archives.
We're going to talk about the psychology of attraction.
So I did a lot of research into this a few weeks ago but never got around to recording it because I was obviously stressed.
But today is the day.
I've just been really fascinated by what creates attraction as a single person and why we like certain people and don't like others, especially in our 20s when it seems, you know, everyone is having these flings and these attractions and these crushes to people and we go out to clubs and we meet people
and we have this spark.
So what kind of creates this so -called spark from a psychological perspective?
We're going to explore the answer to that.
But I wanted to take more of a social psychology approach rather than biological as we traditionally hear about.
You know, obviously we can't really talk about attraction without talking about the neural and hormonal origins but I want to discuss more so how attraction forms in a social environment for romantic partners obviously but also friendships as well while we are attracted to certain people and not others.
Okay, so there is this theory often flaunted by the skeptics of love that attraction is merely chemical.
Love is merely chemical, romance, all of those things.
It's quite like a biological reductionist approach that we can explain everything based on what neurotransmitters are released, what hormones are released and those kinds of things.
And attraction occurs because of hormones mostly related to procreation and sex that are released when we see someone who arouses us or meets our preferences or our love map which is something I'm going to discuss a bit later.
And it's attraction like that instantaneous attraction.
It's often associated with higher levels of serotonin and estrogen for women and testosterone for men and we find people initially attractive because of what is unlocked in our brains and bodies.
Also, when I was researching this for the women who are listening or for those who identify as female or who have periods it's really interesting because you're more likely to find people attractive during certain periods of like your menstrual cycle.
So right after you like finish your period before you like begin to ovulate before you're like most fertile I guess, that's the period where you're most likely to experience like attraction which is really interesting and that drops off after you've ovulated towards like when your periods about to start.
So attraction can be caused by things like physical appearance obviously but also other factors like smell.
So a study that was done this year actually well was published this year found that women with a certain sense are more attractive to men.
So turns out that we are most appealing when we have high estrogen and low progesterone levels which is like I said around when we're ovulating and this balance of hormones indicates high female fertility which is a huge kind of driver of attraction I feel like when we're thinking about it from a sex
perspective or a mating perspective and the research has explained that it makes sense that you know men find women more attractive while they're at this stage because of that instinct to mate and create offspring.
Another one another factor that also has a big kind of role to play in attraction is voice.
So another study a few years ago so a bit outdated but it found that women prefer men with low voices and there could be something inherently biological in this as deeper voices have been linked to producing healthier children in the wild lower pitch is associated with being bigger it might also indicate
greater testosterone levels if your voice is low which is really interesting so smell, voice all of these things that we initially get from someone when we first meet them and other factors that kind of create that rush of serotonin that accompanies attraction maybe certain features like muscles and how
tall you are if you have good skin facial traits tan skin posture all of which can be indicative of someone's fertility obviously but also the capacity to protect to care and to nurture so although like instant attraction might be biologically based it's also influenced by a number of social and environmental
factors that more so allow love and other feelings of attraction but more than that to kind of blossom.
Okay but now moving on to what leads to attraction and friendship beyond that initial spark that initial first glance love at first sight thing so there are four factors that psychologists often identify as leading to attraction so that's proximity, physical attractiveness which we've kind of already
discussed, similarity and liking those who like us.
So proximity is probably the strongest predictor of attraction the more we kind of see and interact with a person the more likely we are to become friends with them or to become attracted to them.
This is really interesting there was a study that you know this was a theory at first and there was a study done to kind of confirm this hypothesis and it was done at the Westgate House community at MIT so it's like a a college basically and they tracked attraction, relationships and friendship formation amongst
people at various apartment buildings and apartment rooms and residents had been assigned their apartments at random which is great we know random allocation makes an experiment a lot more general generalizable yes more valid more reliable but researchers asked the participants to name the people that they
were most attracted to and their three closest friends within the living quarters 65 % of them named people who lived in the same on the same floor so all people who even lived in the same apartment because it was shared 41 % of them said next door neighbors so those right across from them 22 % said two
two doors down so you can kind of see as they get farther away the rate of attraction or friendship kind of drops off and then 10 % of them said the opposite end of the hallway so it kind of seems that attraction and the level of friendship that we have towards people or how attracted we are to them
as a person is related to just the physical distance between people but it's not just like the physical distance it's also functional distance so if there are features in your life or where you're living that make it more likely that you will become close to someone or interact with them that also creates
attraction so if for example people living on the same pathway or someone who's living at the bottom of the stairs where you have to pass by every day they also have a greater chance of meeting people and building those friendships but also that attraction with people that they meet so the proximity
effect it does seem largely to be due to mere exposure so mere the mere mere exposure effect it's basically the tendency to rate stimuli more positively after you've been exposed to them repeatedly so in the case of attraction you rate someone who's more attractive or you're more interested in them
the more that you're exposed to them so we see the more we see people the more familiar we become with them the more likely we are to be attracted to them to become friends with them to pursue something with them and obviously like there are limitations like if the person's really mean doesn't really
matter how close they are it's probably worse if they're closer to you and you don't like them but in general proximity effect does seem to kind of hold up and it's also to deal with familiarity it builds affection and liking so the more exposure the higher frequency of exposure the more favorable you
are so that is one of those core things that relates to who you find attractive it's how close you are distance wise the second one that we talked about that I noticed was similarity and this really fuels growing relationships and attraction to someone so it's not just the physical distance but it's
the match between our interests our attitudes values backgrounds or personality and those of another person so if you share things in common you're more likely to find someone attractive and the more likely a relationship is to evolve research evidence really strongly supports that similarity draws
people together I feel like it's a bit of a no -brainer so you know think about your friends or the person you're in a relationship with or someone that you like you're more likely to share common attitudes you have things that you like in common for example if you like back writing obviously you're
going to be more attracted to someone who shares that interest yeah so if you share things in common it kind of makes sense that attraction will evolve especially because I guess people who are similar to us will like the same things as us but also they validate our own characteristics and beliefs so they
provide us with this feeling that we are right that what we like is right that how we feel is right and that's really important for our self -esteem which is why we might be attracted to them because they validate us and we also tend to make negative and automatic inferences about someone who disagrees
with us on a important issue or who just likes the things that we like because that kind of provides a bit of hostility or kind of I don't know push back towards what we think is good in the world and liking is so powerful you know liking someone though if you like who they are that it can make up for an absence
of similarity so things you know having things in common is important but if you just really like someone sometimes that doesn't even matter and this is where the principle of reciprocity comes in so we like people who like us which kind of links back to that self -esteem self -awareness hypothesis reciprocal
liking sometimes occurs because of a self -fulfilling prophecy so when we expect people to like us we or we think that they like us that elicits more favorable behavior from us which means they're more likely to be favorable or kind to us back so there was this study done I think in the 80s right when like
attraction psychology was starting to take place and basically these two guys Curtis and Miller they got these college students to participate in pairs and the pairs both members of the pairs they hadn't met each other before and one member of each pair was selected randomly to know certain information that the other
student either liked or disliked them obviously this wasn't based on anything the researchers made it up so they kind of like manipulated the experiment so one member of the pair was told oh yeah this person that you're meeting today they really like you or they've heard about you and you know maybe
in another pair the research would be like oh they actually dislike you I don't think that you guys will get along so those who believed that they were liked initially they behaved more positively they disclosed more disagreed less and behaved just in general more warmly to their partner whereas those
who believed they weren't liked actually ended up getting along with the person a lot less even if initial personality tests or interest tests had proven that they actually had quite a lot in common so the partner kind of mirrored that of the other member of the pair so if you thought someone wasn't
going to like you probably weren't going to be as warm to them because you were initially hostile or you know vigilant against an attack against your sense of self this is obviously um maybe not obviously but interestingly moderated by self -esteem so people with a negative self -concept so they don't
really like themselves they don't see themselves very favorable favorably they respond quite differently in this in this experiment which the researchers noticed and would prefer to meet someone who has criticized them before who the researchers said didn't like them if someone is it's friendly to them
and you have a negative self -concept then that behavior kind of appears unwarranted because you believe that you're not a good person and they may not respond positively so that reciprocation is a huge part of attraction liking someone who likes us it makes a lot of sense obviously the big one the one
that most people probably think about in terms of attractive in terms of attraction is it's just physical attractiveness um you know you just find certain people hot you like like what they look like I and you know the research checks up against that men and women both prefer attractive partners and are more
likely to say that they're more attractive or they have greater attraction towards them physically and greater arousal if that person is traditionally attractive this is one of the best indicators of whether someone would like to date someone um so people they often attribute positive qualities to those
who are more attractive um my friend Meg and I were talking about this other day um how attractive people have it so much easier because I think people presume that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well because it's indicative of so much more and our culture kind
of promotes this stereotype in less than subtle ways you know bad characters in movies they're often ugly whilst the good ones are beautiful like Cinderella and Snow White they have perfect skin beautiful bodies and so we see them as good whereas those that are ugly we see them as unhealthy we see them
as cruel we see them as bad and this has like a lot of research behind it people really want to hate on attractive people um well not really hate on attractive people but they want to know why they kind of get further ahead in life I guess so here's a few examples of how this attraction or attractiveness
creates attraction or liking someone so teachers they often judge attractive students as more attractive as more intelligent and unattractive students um adults and nurses who are in pediatric wards they often punish unattractive children more harshly this study in Texas showed that a judge is more
likely or judges just correlationally set lower bales and smaller fines for attractive suspects attractive people make more money they get better job ratings from their bosses and this one is really interesting in terms of attachment and childhood development parents they spend more time looking at attractive
babies and attractiveness of of babies if the baby was really cute was linked to health and treatment in ICU so nurses and doctors not to say they're biased this is obviously very implicit but they tend to spend more time nurturing and caring for babies that look attractive that look cute so even in early
life it's really good to be good looking um you know there's just other things as well like attractive people they're more seen as relaxed and outgoing and that's a huge thing for attraction if you think that someone has all of these desirable traits just from looking at them obviously that attraction is going
to blossom pretty quickly and it does um create kind of a self -fulfilling prophecy so because attractive people are more valued and favored even from birth this causes them to develop greater self -confidence um and if they're more liked they might want that feeling to continue so what ends up happening
is they get more opportunities um they're more valued so that those other kind of attributes and skills and behaviors that make someone attractive or likable develop from that and just in terms of like general attractiveness it's really interesting to note that there is like a lot of cross cross cultural
consistency in terms of body features and what kind of people we're going to find attractiveness from the surface level so across different cultures women um in terms of their facial structure we like people with large and widely separated eyes small nose small chin but also wide cheekbones and um narrow
cheeks so if you think about like the traditional model like the kendall jennas of the world they have all those features um men on the other hand very different we want a square jaw we want small eyes thin lips bushy eyebrows those kind of things and a lot of people from different cultures agree on what is attractive
in a face there's been so many studies that have shown that people across the world find the same types of faces very attractive and even infants um show this they prefer the same photographs of adults and they're often the attractive adults which i think is really interesting in terms of whether attraction to
certain features is made even biological and linked to that health and well -being kind of perspective so attraction towards physical features may be where the idea of love at first sight has come from we see it in movies and in books it's a classical archetype of love of seeing someone and falling in love
with them knowing the other one but is this really real is this a real thing i think a more important mechanism by which humans become captivated by someone is due to your love map this was a concept created by a sexologist called john money very good name so long before you fixate on a specific person that you
find attractive for various reasons you've developed a map it's kind of like a template within your brain that determines what arouses you sexually what drives you to fall in love with one person rather than another what drives you to be friends with one person rather than other to find someone attractive
basically and these love maps they vary from from one individual to the next so some people get turned on you know by a business suit or a doctor's uniform large large boobs small feet laughter um it's all kind of varied but but that averageness and that kind of notion of symmetry still wins out so in um
this one study these psychologists selected 32 faces of Caucasian women only and using computers they averaged all of their features and then they showed these images to college peers and of the 32 photographs of real female faces only three of them were rated as more appealing than these mixed photos
of all the averaged features so that's really interesting this kind of idea of averageness and symmetry is really important and they don't really know why obviously the world does not share the same sexual ideals of Caucasian students from some university in America but like I said despite widely dissimilar
standards of beauty and sex appeal there there are some of those common traits um like the symmetry of the face the small nose the large eyes good complexion um people are also drawn to partners and attracted to people who they regard as clean which makes sense because you don't want to date someone
who has poor hygiene that is really gross um and men in most places they generally prefer plump wide -hipped women to slim ones women prefer broad -shouldered men so looks really count in attraction and so does so does money which makes sense obviously the initial attraction you might not be able to determine
how much someone is is worth maybe by the value of their clothes or something like that um but if you find out that someone has a lot of money or they're pretty well off you could become more attracted to them and this is seen from rural zulus to urban brazilians um you know Caucasian people in Wyoming
men are attracted to young good -looking women while women are drawn to men with property and money and these like male female appetites they're probably innate you know it's in a male's genetic advantage to fall in love and be attracted to a woman who provides and who could produce viable offspring
and it's in a woman's biological advantage traditionally and from an evolutionary standpoint to be attracted to a man who can help her support a young family or you know offspring this can influence love at first sight because we're often immediately captivated by characteristics that fit our love map
and feel an insane attraction to that person if they kind of check off things that in our brain circuitry we know would make us happy and aroused and give that us that serotonin rush and then I think the other thing is we also create expectations for this person that we have this instantaneous attraction for and when people
meet those expectations it's a self -fulfilling prophecy that makes you kind of feel like you've loved them since the beginning since you first laid eyes on them another important consideration in terms of love at first sight or attraction is that it might have a critical adaptive function amongst animals
and including humans so during the mating season a female squirrel for example needs to breed and if she sees a healthy squirrel who probably doesn't fit her love map but maybe the biological physical map of what is a good partner she really shouldn't waste any more time she should size him up see if he's
right and if he looks suitable she'd probably grab the chance to copulate she needs to have babies that's you know what her instinct is driving her towards so perhaps love at first sight it's no more than an inborn tendency in many creatures that has evolved to spur the mating process and then among
our human ancestors what has been animal attraction involved into a human sensation of infatuation at a glance and love at first sight so we've talked about proximity we've talked about similarity reciprocal feelings um what else physical attractiveness but then there's familiarity and this might be
the most important factor that kind of runs through them all when research participants rated the attractiveness of faces they rated the faces that most matched or looked like their own as the most attractive this is because people who are similar to us will also feel familiar to us and it's reciprocal
liking again people who look like each other if we if we see someone a lot then we begin to understand their face they've become familiar to us and that makes us feel comfortable and it makes us feel acknowledged in some ways invalidated which i just think is really interesting like how that kind of comes
about how we you know people who are familiar are more attractive because of that proximity but also because we become to understand their facial features and feel a sense of comfort around them so let's jump into some theories of interpersonal attraction which has kind of been coming towards this so there
are a few the first one the most prominent idea in psychology is social exchange theory this is the idea that people's feelings about attraction and a relationship depends on the perceptions of rewards and costs the kind of relationship they deserve and their chances for having a better relationship
with someone else we really want to find the best relationship that we can get so the rewards that we might you know kind of weigh up when we first find someone attractive are the positive gratifying aspects of a potential relationship that make it worthwhile this might include things like status and physical
attractiveness or money as we were considering before but then there's the costs and all friendships and relationships they have some costs however if rewards outweigh costs we'll probably pursue that person we find attractive and this is all dependent on comparison level relative to expectations experience
alternatives if a relationship doesn't match our comparison level of what we expect we will be unhappy and it really depends on our point of view people with a low comparison level they're more likely to stay in costly relationships which is quite sad like if you don't believe you can do better that first
person you find attractive might just be the one and you might just stick it out with them there's another idea of equity theory and this is the idea that people are happiest in relationships where they initially feel attracted to someone when the rewards and costs experienced are shared by both parties
equally so basically what that means is neither one is giving too much you know you're not going to be attracted to someone who never texts you back maybe you will or who you know makes you feel like they don't want you there or that they don't like you we're going to be attracted to someone who gives
as much as we give into into a relationship and equitable relationships they're the most happiest and the most stable and it's a pretty powerful social norm equity we want people want both people to benefit equally and people kind of prefer to be the one who benefits more so it's more of a problem for those
who are under benefited so making sure that it's an equal kind of standing is really good for those long -term relationships let's kind of break down that cycle of long -term loving relationships because we have that initial intense liking stage of attraction and that's called passionate love but that kind
of moves on to companion love as we know someone more when that initial attraction that excitement that spark begins to fade so starting with passionate love it's kind of been what we've been talking about this whole time it tends to refer to attraction and love that's characterized by high arousal
intense attraction and fear of rejection the important aspect is that the person has to attribute arousal to the right target for passionate love to emerge so sometimes we can confuse arousal and love and this is called excitation transfer excitation transfer i don't think many people it's not really
like a big theory in psychology which i'm kind of surprised about because it makes a lot of sense and it comes from this study called love on the bridge so there's two bridges one bridge has a tendency to tilt and sway and feel unstable and kind of shake around and the other bridge feels a lot safer
it does not sway it's not that high up it's you know made of concrete it's very stable the first bridge obviously is going to generate a lot more arousal so we have these participants male participants and they were approached on either of the bridges by an attractive female experimenter and that experimenter
they asked the participant to tell them a story about a relationship and in the suspension bridge condition where there's a swaying and an instability the men wrote more sexual stories and were more likely to call the experimenter to see if their date with this attractive female confederate went well
however those in the controlled safe bridge condition wrote significantly less sexual stories and only 13 of them called the experimenter so this is evidence of excitation transfer participants on the unsafe bridge were more aroused but attributed this arousal to meeting the woman not the bridge whereas
those on the safer bridge didn't feel that same level of physiological arousal so kind of what this all comes down to is is romantic love we have that attraction but how does that create romantic love interestingly enough a lot of research has been done into this and romantic love seems to have a lifespan passionate
love has a lifespan more like that attraction is only really going to last 18 to 20 months so you know if you're lucky you've got like a year or two years sorry like a year and a half two years of that attraction and after that when relationships do last companion love appears to be what what really
sustains a relationship and this refers companion love this refers to affection we feel for those whom our lives are deeply entwined to it's a secure trusting partnership so most common responses amongst married couples have been together for more than 15 years when asked about how their marriage lasted
is that their partner is their best friend or they like their partner as a person so what enables these kind of close relationships to form that is what we are going to discuss in this next segment I guess okay so there are three important factors that enable close relationships number one attachment
style number two equity which we kind of already talked about number three is self -disclosure starting with attachment style so attachment theory it's really really popular these days in pop culture but it suggests that a particular we learn a particular attachment style as infants from our caregivers
and this kind of becomes our working model on what attraction and relationship should look like later in life there's kind of a bit of debate about how many there are but I think that there are four um so secure this is rooted in trust and marked by intimacy preoccupied it's marked by someone's own
sense of unworthiness and anxiety within a relationship we have dismissive this is an avoidant relationship marked by distrust for others and fearful and it's an avoidant relationship marked by a fear of rejection so those with secure attachment styles are most successful in romantic relationships where attraction has initially
formed or passionate love has initially formed they also appear to have more enduring relationships and they report more satisfaction it's important though I think we see a lot of like tick tocks and instagram reels and it's it's everywhere about what your attachment style is and it's not predictive
it is in part determined by the person you're with their behavior and the state of your relationships and human brains are also plastic so you can change what your attachment style is and unlearn schemas or things you've learned from your parents or other caregivers or people around you equity so this is a condition under which the outcomes
that people receive are proportional to what they contribute to a relationship so people in a stable long -term relationship they're unconcerned with short -term equity and tend not to keep track of what they're giving and receiving and this is a really healthy long -term equity strategy if you're not keeping
track of who's giving more you often tend to be happier because it always comes around finally self -disclosure and this is the thing I kind of find most interesting so this kind of refers to revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others and this really creates greater attraction and a more deep attraction and connection so in persistent
growing relationships partners often show increasing self -disclosure and this seems to be driven by principles of disclosure reciprocity and the tendency to match each other's level of self -disclosure attraction like we've discussed it builds from biology but it is molded by our environment and we can eventually
create long -lasting stable love from that initial spark if we follow kind of some of those almost rules of equity and self -disclosure and trust but I just think it's really interesting you know we've kind of investigated and talked about that initial feeling and that hormonal rush you know due to voice
and due to smell and due to attractiveness but then when we add in factors like proximity and familiarity reciprocity and similarity it shows that you know it's kind of almost deterministic who we fall for who we find attractive it's probably you know someone you live close to someone you see a lot
someone who you have things in common with someone from your neighborhood um so we may not have as much choice as we think anyhow I hope that episode was informative I hope that you've learned something about maybe your type your love map what makes you attracted to certain people and not to others
and I think that's super important in our 20s we're attracted to a lot of people people are really attractive um we're all willing to bang because I don't know it's that time so knowing like why you fall for those certain people is really important I think or just interesting to know like next time
you find yourself having a crush think about some of those factors that we've talked about um you know is it just because they're like your next door neighbor or just because you both like star wars or something like that um obviously not to be taken too seriously I'm not a professional but I hope that you
enjoyed this episode and I'm yeah I'm back on the podcast grind so more episodes are coming in the future I think next week we're definitely going to talk about the psychology of life transitions which is a huge thing for your 20s and yeah that anxiety around it as well and if you like this episode
remember to subscribe the podcast it's on apple spotify google so many other places um and thanks for all the support and thanks for bearing with me while I had a little break can't wait to record a few more things soon and thank you for listening this year I've been really rethinking my relationship
with alcohol and so I decided to commit to dry January to really kickstart 2025 and just test myself Heineken 00 is the perfect companion for dry January because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for friends out for drinks whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals I'm a big
beer fan so I also love the taste of Heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls Heineken 00 is available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken .com you must be 21 plus to purchase enjoy Heineken responsibly and good luck with dry January
