Katharina Buczek
We tend to be most attracted to people who share similar interests. However, new research published by the American Psychological Association (APA) shows that this attraction might be rooted in the flawed belief that similar interests reflect a more fundamental similarity or “essence.”
“Our attraction to people who share our attributes is aided by the belief that those shared attributes are driven by something deep within us: one’s essence,” explained Charles Chu, the study’s lead author.
“To put it concretely, we like someone who agrees with us on a political issue, share our music preferences, or simply laughs at the same thing as us not purely because of those similarities, but because those similarities suggest something more– this person is, in essence, like me, and as such, they share my views of the world at large.”
According to Chu, the thought process behind this is fueled by psychological essentialism that specifically applies to people’s notions about individual identity and the self. In turn, people “essentialize”– or define something by a set of deep-rooted properties– different types of things in all cultures.
“For example, the category of ‘wolf’ is defined by a wolf essence, residing in all wolves, from which stems attributes such as their pointy noses, sharp teeth, and fluffy tails as well as their pack nature and aggressiveness,” Chu detailed.
But beyond other categories, the researchers discovered that as humans, we essentialize the self, too.
To essentialize yourself is to define who you are by a set of unchanging and deeply-rooted properties. So, those who self-essentialize believe that the way they behave and the way other people view them is caused by a specific essence.
The researchers set out to better understand how this self-essentialism impacts attraction by conducting four different experiments.
In the first experiment, 954 participants were asked to share their position on one of five social causes– which were randomly assigned. These social causes included capital punishment, abortion, animal testing, gun ownership, and physician-assisted suicide.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
