by Sam Sommers
Much like this fictitious romantic, we resist the conclusion that had we moved to a different building, gone to a different college, or taken a different job, we likely would have forged our most intimate of connections—romantic as well as platonic—with different people. We’re uncomfortable with the idea that a simple twist of context is sometimes all that separates the dear friend or loved one from the casual acquaintance or complete stranger.
But be realistic. If Capulet had settled in Venice rather than fair Verona, there’d be no Romeo and Juliet. And if Cunningham Hardware had been based in Madison rather than less fair Milwaukee, Joanie never would have loved Chachi. Like it or not, perhaps the most critical determinant of attraction is simple geography, which—if you’re anything like my students—didn’t make your list of three.
AT THE END of World War II, the homecoming of thousands of servicemen led to a surge of enrollment at American universities. MIT was no exception. Combined with a preexisting shortage of affordable housing, the fact that many returning soldiers were married or had children forced university officials to look for creative strategies.
Their solution was Westgate. A new residential community with two separate complexes, its first phase included one hundred prefabricated single-family houses arranged into U-shaped “courts.” Next came the not-so-creatively named Westgate West, consisting of more than a dozen two-story apartment buildings, each with ten rental units. Taken together, the entire community housed up to 270 families.
From the perspective of behavioral researchers, Westgate was almost too good to be true. Its location on a university campus and its unique status as an enclosed neighborhood into which all residents had moved during a narrow time frame made it a social science version of Biosphere 2. Westgate provided an ideal opportunity for actually quantifying the impact of physical space on relationship development. And that’s precisely what researchers did.1 Five decades later, they surely would have been beaten to the punch by reality TV producers.
The research was straightforward: residents were asked to name their closest friends in the community. The results were just as clear-cut: the nearer residents lived to each other, the more likely they were to become friends. Those in the subdivision were most likely to list others who lived in the same court, and the closer the houses, the closer the friendship. Same for the apartment complex—60 percent of the friends listed lived next door to the person who named them, while less than 4 percent lived as far as four apartments away.
At first blush, this might not seem that enlightening or surprising a finding. You may have assumed that the more often we cross paths with someone, the more likely we are to become friends. But did you have any idea just how powerful this impact of proximity is? Nineteen feet. That’s all it takes. For every meager nineteen feet of apartment floor plan that separated two Westgate neighbors, their chances of developing a close friendship were cut by nearly half. That’s how profoundly context shapes even our most intimate and meaningful social connections.
Lessons of Westgate transcend strict distance, implicating physical space as well. People with houses looking out on the pedestrian-friendly common area were listed as friends far more often than those on the end of a court facing the street. In apartments, those residents most likely to take the leap and make friends on other floors of the building were the renters living next to the stairwell. Location, location, location, indeed.
Though we infrequently and begrudgingly acknowledge it, our own relationships have similar, proximity-driven legacies. My freshman year of college I lived in a hallway that contained three double rooms. By graduation, my inner circle still included my original roommate and the two guys who had lived next door. While we might have fancied the idea that some sort of cosmic plan had placed us near one another—that we would’ve been drawn to one another even had we been assigned to dorms in different corners of campus—the truth is that our friendships owed more to the vagaries of the housing office than inevitable compatibility. Quickly, ours became real relationships sustained by less superficial considerations, but proximity opened the figurative door in the first place.
Of course, living near someone doesn’t guarantee liking them. Far from it. Of the other two guys in my freshman hallway—members of the basketball team who shared a suite three times the size of the regular rooms—one never bothered to learn our names, and the second spent the entire year calling everyone on the floor “Sam.”
Indeed, the strong feelings made possible by proximity can be negative as well as positive. That is, proximity also predicts who we dislike. From the neighbor who always takes your parking spot to the loudmouth in the cubicle next to yours at work, frequent contact can also rub the wrong way. A more recent study of condos in Southern California found results similar to those at Westgate: the closer residents lived, the more likely they were to be good friends. But when asked to list their least favorite people in the neighborhood, again the list was dominated by those living nearby.2
Sort of like how basketball guy number one and I felt about each other freshman year. He had a habit of playing loud music with his door open at 2:00 a.m., and when I’d come by to ask him to turn it down, he’d look at me earnestly and pause a beat before replying, “Nah.”
Charming.
In response, each morning I’d wait until he closed his locked door to walk, half naked, to the shower before I called his room phone. He’d run back down the hall holding his towel with one hand and keys with the other, only to have me hang up as soon as he got inside. I never tired of the audible string of obscenities that would emanate from his room—you would’ve thought he was waiting for a call from an organ donor registry. And then, at 2:00 a.m. that night, our ritual dance would begin anew.
So, mundane factors like geography and floor plan have a profound impact on our acquisition of close friends as well as nemeses. But when I asked you about attraction, odds are you pondered it in more romantic or even sexual terms. Well, proximity shapes those relationships, too.
Sociologists have analyzed marriage licenses in a range of U.S. cities. Whether Philadelphia, Duluth, or Columbus, the nearer two people’s residences, the more likely they are to marry. In the Ohio study, for example, more than half of engaged couples had lived within sixteen blocks of each other when they started dating.3 More than one-third lived as close as five blocks. Similar results emerge for casual romantic relationships as well, such as dating patterns by college residence hall or, presumably, marching band section.
In short, when you chart the physical configuration of a neighborhood, apartment building, or dormitory, you get a pretty good map of its social configuration as well. About to move and looking to make friends quickly? Hoping to expand your pool of potential dating partners? Pick the apartment near the mailroom or by the elevators. The increased foot traffic may be detrimental to your sleep schedule and carpet wear, but it can work wonders for your social life.
YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE to bump into someone—figuratively or literally—for proximity to spin its magic: such effects on attraction don’t always hinge on cinematically dramatic convergences. It’s not always two hands simultaneously reaching for a taxi door on a rainy night or the happenchance encounter of grocery shoppers each carrying the obligatory paper bag with a loaf of French bread sticking out. The impact of proximity can be much subtler.
Simply encountering people (or objects) with regularity is enough to render them more appealing. Or, as psychologists would phrase the same idea, “mere exposure facilitates attraction.” This is not to be confused, of course, with other types of exposure, which facilitate instead a hefty fine and ankle-monitoring device.
This link between exposure and liking even emerges for something as utterly mundane as language. Show respondents a series of nonsense words like zabulon and ikitaf, and they end up preferring the ones that they viewed the most times.4 Same goes for English speakers presented with a series of previously unfamiliar Chinese characters.
As it
turns out, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. It breeds liking. By default, we associate good feelings with that which is familiar, like comfort food, longtime political incumbents, certain corporate logos, and the sound of the local play-by-play announcer’s voice. Reactions such as “I feel like I’ve heard this song before” and “Haven’t we already met?” leave us more positively inclined toward the stimulus in question.
So it goes with love as well. George Costanza was on to something when he’d “accidentally” leave his keys at his date’s apartment to give him an excuse to stop by again. It may have been, as Elaine suggested, a pathetic way to weasel a second date. But it worked. And in real life, too, familiarity is a powerful if often overlooked ingredient of attraction.
How else to explain why merely sitting passively in the same room as someone else can make you feel more attracted to her? That’s all it took in one study, in which a professor at the University of Pittsburgh arranged for several women who weren’t actually enrolled in his large lecture course to sit in the audience.5 One woman sat through the class five times that semester. Another did so ten times. The third woman came to fifteen different lectures, all the while sitting quietly and not interacting at all with the more than one hundred students in the room.
At the end of the term, the professor showed the class a series of slides with photos of different women, including the interlopers. He asked the class to rate each photo in terms of familiarity as well as attractiveness. Ratings of the attractiveness of the three women were predicted by how many classes each had attended: students reported the greatest attraction to the woman who had been in class fifteen times, followed by the one who had attended ten times, followed by the five-timer. The greater the students’ exposure to each woman, the more attracted they were to her.
The students were largely unaware of why they felt this way—the number of classes each woman went to had a much smaller impact on ratings of how familiar each face seemed. Just like commercial jingles and George Costanza, these women slipped undetected into the mental category “familiar.” That was all it took to make them seem more attractive. Again, when you stop to think about it, this is an amazing demonstration of just how important context is for our most treasured of feelings and relationships. In a world in which people shell out money for mate compatibility reports and profiles of romantic personality style, simply seeing someone repeatedly without exchanging so much as a word turns out to be enough to spark attraction.
Indeed, when it comes to judgments of physical beauty, there is a clear link between familiarity and attractiveness—one that often remains subconscious. Because when you ask people to describe the superficial attributes to which they’re drawn, they rarely have trouble describing their “type.” Just check out the personals section. Inevitably someone is seeking a “tall, broad-shouldered guy with athletic build.” Or a “blonde, preferably slender or petite.” And then there are the more idiosyncratic preferences—you know, the really weird fetishes like “nebbish, academic type with poor sense of direction and fragile fingers.”
But while most of us have clear ideas regarding what we find beautiful, we fail to recognize the role of familiarity. In spite of society’s celebration of trademark features—Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, Johnny Depp’s cheekbones, Jennifer Lopez’s . . . ahem, other cheeks—we actually prefer average features, all else being equal. When asked to choose between a photo of an actual individual and a composite combining the faces of several people, we typically find the composite photo more attractive. The more faces morphed together—the more features thrown into the average—the more familiar and attractive that composite becomes.6
In short, familiarity helps account for the impact of proximity on liking, and it provides yet another example of a mundane factor that shapes attraction. Just as you prefer the way your voice sounds in your own head to how it sounds on tape, just as you like how you look in the mirror more than how you look on video, you also find other people more attractive the more familiar they seem.
It’s almost enough to convince you that it would be a good idea to leave a life-size cardboard cutout of yourself outside the bedroom window of your latest crush, just to capitalize on the impact of familiarity.
Almost. Don’t overlook the potential problems of soggy weather and general creepiness. You’d be better off just joining his or her gym instead.
MORE CONTEXTS OF LOVE
It’s not only proximity and familiarity that we look past in the name of all that is face/butt/wit. There are actually a number of situational factors that impact attraction, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at my students’ lists of three. What follows is but a brief sampling:
1. Reciprocity. As mentioned earlier, when a waitress brings candy with the check, we feel obligated—even if subconsciously—to reciprocate. So we leave a bigger tip. Attraction works much the same way. Or, at least, that’s the assumption driving anyone who’s ever bought a drink for a stranger sitting at the bar. It’s not a bad strategy: research indicates that men who buy drinks like this are, on the whole, viewed as more attractive afterward, not to mention more likely to eventually win a date.7
When it comes to attraction, though, reciprocity does more than elicit feelings of obligation. When you find out that someone has a thing for you, it changes the way you think about her or him. Suddenly, that person seems just a little bit more attractive. Becoming aware of someone else’s feelings opens the door to new relationship possibilities, prompting you to see this admirer in a new light. At the very least, you now know that this is a person of refined taste, right?
To illustrate, in one study sixty strangers were instructed to have a “get to know you” conversation with a stranger.8 Afterward, they were led to separate rooms and eventually shown a questionnaire that their partner had supposedly completed. Some read that their partner had a lukewarm impression of them; others learned that their partner had enjoyed the conversation. When given the chance to interact again, those participants who believed their partner liked them disclosed more personal information than did the others. They even engaged in the conversation with a more positive, pleasant tone of voice, as determined by observers who listened to a recording of the interaction.
In other words, finding out that someone likes you is often enough to get you to reach out and open up to them. Thus begins an anything-but-vicious cycle that ends with a closer relationship.
2. Obstacles. Generally speaking, we value our sense of independence. It’s not only two-year-olds and adolescents who rebel against being told what to do or how to think—adults also chafe at hearing that a goal is unattainable or “you have no choice.” I, for one, have suffered through multiple unpleasant meals at ethnic restaurants because I was unwilling to defer to a waiter’s suggestion that the dish might be spicier than I would like. Insisting that the gringo can handle it may not lead to a satisfying dining experience, but at least I emerge with free will intact. Or so the stubborn thinking goes.
It’s not a particularly romantic conclusion, but in this sense, attraction isn’t that different from ordering the Szechuan chicken. The harder people try to steer us away from someone, the more intrigued we often become. Literature—as well as real life—is filled with examples of star-crossed lovers and other couples brought together, ironically, by the obstacles between them. Not to mention parents who have learned the hard way that warning a teenager not to date someone can have the opposite effect.
Beyond not liking it when our options are limited by others, there’s also a certain allure to pursuing relationships we’re not supposed to. As far back as biblical times, there’s always been appeal to the forbidden fruit. Indeed, secrecy makes a relationship just that much more attractive. Psychologist Dan Wegner and colleagues at the University of Virginia once asked more than one thousand people about romantic feelings from their past. For both crushes and actual relationships, those described as having some aura of secrecy remained more memorable years later—and, for
that matter, were still more preoccupying. 9
In fact, Wegner and his fellow researchers recreated this power of forbidden love within the confines of a behavioral laboratory. In an experiment best described as the “footsie study,” they recruited foursomes for a card game. Each group was split into two mixed-gender pairs, and while both teams heard the same set of game rules, one team also received separate written instructions: they were supposed to play footsie.
OK, so the instructions were a bit more elaborate than that. The pair was told that the study was about nonverbal communication, and that the researchers wanted to see if they’d be able to send information to each another by touching feet under the table. They might use a certain number of toe taps to indicate a card’s value, for example. But the end result was that one pair was playing casino-style footsie while the other was not.
What does this have to do with forbidden love? Well, researchers instructed half the couples to keep the podiatric mingling to themselves, while the other half was told that the opposing team knew what they were up to. After the game, participants were asked a series of questions, including how attracted they were to their partner. Mere physical contact wasn’t the biggest influence on their responses. Instead, it was those couples who played secret footsie that reported the most attraction to each other.
