So, we've talked about the self. We've talked about self and other. Now, let's look at how we think about other people, and turn away from attribution, but look towards the question of what we like about other people. This is of course, a classic problem we struggle with as scientists, but also in everyday life, what attracts us to others? What can we do to become attracted to others? There are obvious answers that are probably true, traits like honesty, kindness, intelligence, and so on. But social psychologists emphasize in the course of human affairs, other, perhaps more fundamental processes also play a role. So, one is simply familiarity. The more you see something, the more you like it. This applies for objects, it applies for squiggles, it applies for pictures, and it applies for people. There's numerous studies finding that just being in the presence of another person, makes you more attracted to them over time. Now, you can overdo it. You could become sick of a person, but familiarity is still considerable boost. In fact, when you look at studies about who gets married to each other, and who becomes friends with each other, you find that proximity plays a huge role. Just being close to somebody down the hall, in the college dormitory, or in the same block in a neighborhood, means you see the more often. You see more often, you're just more likely to get together. The idea that just seeing something, nothing more, causes you to like it more is known as the mere-exposure effect, and again, has been studied over a range of different things. Then there's similarities. You might have heard opposites attract. There's actually no reason to believe that. We tend to like individuals who are similar to us. Then plainly, there's attractiveness. If I had the time to have a lecture on sexual desire and sexual psychology, we will look at a different theories as to what makes a person attractive, but here we mean physical attractiveness. Physical attractiveness plays a powerful role in who we choose to be with as short-term partners, as long-term partners, as friends, and so on. In fact, there's a more general attractiveness bias, which is physically attractive people are not only more attractive to us, they are also considered to be smarter, and more competent, and more social, even more moral. There are studies suggesting that teachers rate good-looking kids as smarter and higher achieving, that we give attractive kids more slack. When an ugly kid does something bad, you think less because they're a bad kid. When a good-looking kid does something bad, you might blame the situation. There's even studies involving mock trials where judges give longer prison sentences two unattractive people. All of this leads to what psychologists like to call a Matthew effect. A Matthew effect is based on a passage in the Bible which says, "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Which is a fancy way of saying the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. In this context what this means is, it's really nice to be blessed with good looks. It suggests great unfairness in the universe that the fact that you're blessed with good looks, means everything else comes easier to you as well. So, that's one phenomena about human attractiveness. Another one, in how we judge people, and how we decide what to think of people, and who to get close to is the power of first impressions. So, there's a famous experiment by Kelly where you bring in a speaker, and you give people information before about the person, and half of them are told that the person is very warm, and others have told rather cold. This shapes the interpretation of what the guest speaker is thought of later on. If you thought they were warm, you interpret them as more warm. If you thought they were cold, you interpret them as more cold. If you're meeting somebody, and before you meet them, your friend says he has a bit of a temper. Now, everything you see from their behavior is shaped by that first interpretation. It sets up a schema, it sets up a structure of understanding. So, first impressions are very powerful. Another finding which is actually rather cool and rather intuitive, is that we form first impressions very quickly. This is sometimes called thin slices. The idea is that if you show people a clip of behaviors, could be like five seconds long, people are surprisingly good at making judgments. For first, they do make judgments. We're naturally judgmental, and we very rarely say, "Well, that's not enough information." We find it easy to make judgments. We make judgments about people's teaching evaluations, about their personality, ratings, where they stand on The Big Five we talked about earlier, and whether or not they're gay or straight. In each of these cases, people do pretty good. People do better than average. A final twist in the impressions of others is concerns the facts that our perceptions of other people have on other people. So, it's not like we're judging wines, or houses, or landscapes, where you judge a static thing and that's it. When you judge people, there's an interaction effect where how you judge a person often affects how the person behaves later on. This is sometimes known as a self-fulfilling prophecies, where your beliefs and expectations about a person create reality. More specifically, it's known as the Pygmalion effect. The Pygmalion effect is person A thinks person B is a certain way, and person B might behave in accordance with that characteristic. It was based on this play by George Bernard Shaw, My Fair Lady in musical. Somebody has transformed through the intentions of another person, and a person who's transformed, Eliza Doolittle, says in the play, "You see really and truly, the difference between a lady and a flower girl, is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will." The terminology is pretty archaic, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what a flower girl is, but the logic is if you treat somebody like a virtuous honest person, they're likely to become virtuous and honest. If you treat them as cruel and indifferent, it will cause them to become cruel and indifferent. There's a lot of studies of the self-fulfilling prophecy, and I'll end with one of them by Rosenthal and Jacobson, where you went to a school, and they did IQ test with kids, and they told teachers that the test was a ''spurters test''. The test is going to select kids whose IQ is going to bump up. Then they just randomly told the teachers, "These students are ''spurters'', they're going to shoot up. These are not." It was totally random, there was no test at all. But as a result of this, the ''spurters'' actually showed improvements in their IQ test scores, and this is in part because the teachers believed they were the kids to become ''spurters'', and that made them do better. So, we think about people in all sorts of ways, but it's worth keeping in mind that how we think about them, affects how they really are.
