1
Com 472
Winter 2015
Class 6
STARTING RELATIONSHIPS IN SOCIAL CONTEXT
I. OVERVIEW
A. Two central questions today:
1. Why do you meet the people you meet?
2. What propels people into the early stages of relationships?
B. Text (p. 147): “relationships spring to life because people are in proximity to other people.”
C. So what brings people into contact with others? According to the text, four basic impulses or needs bring people together:
1. The impulse to receive stimulation
2. The impulse to express our own experience
3. The impulse to assert ourselves (2 examples from text: testing ourselves, dealing with anxiety).
4. The impulse to enhance the enjoyment of activities (“hard to be festive alone”)
D.Today I’m going to take a different perspective—one that is less concerned with broad inner needs and more concerned with how we fit into social networks.
E. Let’s start with the legendary advice columnist Ann Landers:
Dear Readers:
Do you believe in fate? Or is it just dumb luck—a matter of being in the right place at the right time? When I asked by readers how they met their mates, I was struck by how frequently Cupid had arranged for them to be sitting next to one another. … An incredible number of people told me they just happened to be seated next to one another on a place, train, bus, roller coaster, street car or camel ride.
F. What do you think? Why did you meet the people you met?
II. BEYOND THE MYTH OF THE OPEN FIELD…
A. In the United States, we believe that relational choices are made in an “open field” that maximizes personal choice.
B. The “open field” is, however, only a matter of degree.
C. In other cultures…
1. Arranged marriage
2. Managed social contacts
D. And what about other relationships – friendship?
H. Four ways in your relational choices are influenced:
1. social norms in relationship initiation.
2. physical proximity in relationship initiation
3. social proximity in relationship initiation
4. third parties in relationship initiation.
III. LIMITING THE OPEN FIELD: ROLE OF SOCIAL NORMS IN RELATIONSHIP INITIATION
A. Relationship initiation as a screening process—
… from a large
“field of availables”
… select a narrower “field of eligibles.”
and then a still narrower “field of desirables.”
B. Some aspects of the selection process are quite personal, but others reflect broader social norms regarding who is an appropriate and desirable partner.
C. The most powerful of these is the norm of similarity or homogamy. “Birds of a feather flock together.” We generally selected partners who are similar to us in:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
D. How important are similarities in background and personality anyway?
1.
2.
3. Matching on similarities, however, is no guarantee of long-term success.
a. Detailed analysis of similarity matching in online dating sites by Finkel, Eastwick, Karney, Reis, and Sprecher (2012) concluded:
b. Why?
IV. LIMITING THE FIELD: ROLE OF PHYSICAL PROXIMITY IN RELATIONSHIP INITIATION.
A. Physical proximity is most widely recognized factor accounting for why some people meet and others do not.
B. Research dating back to 1930’s: you are more likely to meet and begin a relationship with someone nearby than with someone not so near.
C. Problems with physical proximity as an explanation…
1.
2.
3.
V. LIMITING THE FIELD: ROLE OF SOCIAL PROXIMITY IN RELATIONSHIP INITIATION.
A. Let’s consider a hypothetical network of relationships:
Time 0
C. But first, we need a few simple rules to guide our simulation…
1. Social Proximity Principles:
a.
b.
2. Assumptions about Relationships:
a.
b.
D. Now, let’s reconsider our network – who’s likely to meet next? Likely to grow closer? Likely to terminate ?
Let set things in motion, but let’s also follow a couple of people: Bill and Sylvia
[animation shown]
E. Research on social proximity effects:
1. Very hard to research directly…
2. In a national sample of married and cohabitating couples in the Netherlands: almost half had common friends before they met
(KalmijnHenk Flap,2001)
3. In my studies of almost 900 individuals involved in opposite-sex romantic relationships or same-sex friendships (Parks, 2007)
a. Respondents were asked which of their partner’s 12 closest friends and family they had met prior to meeting their partner for the very first time.
b. 66.3% had met at least one member of their partner’s network of family and friends prior to meeting partners for the first time.
c. No sex or age differences
VI. LIMITING THE FIELD: ROLE OF THIRD PARTIES IN RELATIONSHIP INITIATION.
A. In my example above, Bill and Sylvia were brought together unintentionally when Donna and Carrie decided to have a party.
1. That is, activities in the network put two people in physical proximity.
2. Here the network has a passive or unintentional effect.
B. But in many cases, network members haveactive effects—they actively try to initiate relationships among the people they know.
1. “Matchmaking” vs. “Helping”
2. Need to think broadly about what people do.
C. To explore these “third party effects” we surveyed 437 young adults about their experience during the previous year…
1. How often they “helped” others get romantic relationships started and what they did.
2. How often they had received “help” from third parties and what the third parties had done to help them get a romantic relationship started.
… our goal was to answer several basic questions.
D. How common is third party help?
E. Who helps? Who receives help?
1.
2.
3
4.
5.
F. How are helpers and recipients related?
1. The helper’s location within the social network was critical.
2. The most common link was one in which the helper was much closer to one recipient than the other…
… so why is that?
G. Are recipients aware of the help they receive?
1.
2
3.
4.
H. So what do helpers actually do? (3 types of strategies).
1. Attraction manipulations -- efforts to make one party more attractive in the eyes of the other. Examples:
2. Direct initiations – efforts to put the parties together, to create meetings. Examples:
3. Direct assists – other activities intended to facilitate the relationship. Examples:
I. So…. where the helpers successful?
1. The majority of helpers believed that they had been successful in helping the relationship get started.
2. Those who got help dated more extensively:
Frequency of dating in previous 12 months / Received third party help / Did not receive third party helpDated extensively (several different people)
Dated somewhat
Did not date