Failure of Personality Variables to Mediate Interpersonal Attraction

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In previous research conducted by Byrne and his co-workers a consistent finding has been that attraction toward a stranger is a direct linear function of the proportion of attitudes S and the stranger share. However, considerable individual differences in attraction responses toward strangers evincing equal-attitude similarity suggest the existence of mediating personality variables. Attraction scores derived from the standard Byrne paradigm (Byrne, 1969) were correlated with personality measures for overlapping subgroups of 543 undergraduates. These measures were: Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability, Test Anxiety Questionnaire, Edwards Social Desirability, D-30 Depression, and Leary Interpersonal Checklist scales. Only the D-S measure of the Leary ICL correlated significantly with attraction and only for High Similarity Ss ( r = .31, N = 43, p < .05), a rather marginal finding in view of the sample size and magnitude of correlation. It is suggested that attention be focussed upon within-subject attraction variance in order to explore the phenomenon further.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: