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'Opposites attract' is a MYTH: People who disagree with us trigger negative feelings that lead to repulsion
Professor Viren Swami, a social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, explains why the romantic myth that 'opposites attract' is far from the truth.
If you were brought up on a diet of Disney fairy tales, you might be forgiven for thinking that opposites attract. But a new study tracking people's digital footprints – how they behave online – suggests this isn't true to life
The romantic myth that 'opposites attract' has been around for centuries.
From Beauty and the Beast to the Little Mermaid, many popular fairy tales are centred around couples coming together in spite of their glaring differences.
But according to decades of scientific research, opposites tend to find each other repulsive.
In a piece for The Conversation, Professor Viren Swami, a social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, explores why opposites rarely attract.
And it isn't the first time science has come to this conclusion. For decades, psychologists and sociologists have pointed out that the idea that opposites attract is a myth.
In fact, almost all the evidence suggests that opposites very rarely attract.
The psychologist Donn Byrne was one of the first to study the impact of similarity on the early stages of relationships. To do so, he developed a method known as the 'phantom stranger technique'.
People who agree with us validate our attitudes and so satisfy this need, whereas people who disagree with us tend to stimulate negative feelings – anxiety, confusion and maybe even anger – that lead to repulsion.
Byrne's early research was limited to similarity of attitudes, but other research has suggested that there may also be greater attraction to others who share similar sociodemographic dimensions.
For example, studies have shown that online daters are more likely to contact and reply to others who have similar educational and ethnic backgrounds as themselves, and are of a similar age.
However, Byrne's later research suggested that attitudinal similarity may be more important than sociodemographic similarity when it comes to relationship formation.
Too much similarity?
But this isn't quite the end of the story. Psychologist Arthur Aron believes that, while similarity is important, there may be some situations in which it can actually undermine attraction.
He argued that people also have a need to grow and expand the self – and that one reason why we form relationships with others is because we can assimilate some of the qualities of our partners, which promotes such growth.
The implication is that we will be attracted to others who offer the greatest potential for self-expansion – and someone who is similar in values and traits provides much less potential for growth than someone who is different.
So, the model ends up predicting that dissimilarity can sometimes be attractive, especially if you believe that there is a good possibility a relationship will develop.
Aron's research using the phantom stranger technique would seem to support this idea.
But of course, the picture gets more complicated when we consider how couples actually behave in real life.
For example, when couples discover that they disagree strongly on some topic they often bring their attitudes into 'alignment' with each other – becoming more similar to each other over time.
So, if you're single and looking, the advice from decades of scientific research is simple: Stop believing that the right match for you is someone who has the opposite qualities to you.
Opposites almost never attract and you're much better off focusing on people who have similar qualities and attitudes to yourself, but who offer some potential for self-expansion.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ract-MYTH.html
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