Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

much more rapidly than any postal or delivery service. These uses plainly are not revolutionary, just partial replacements of existing communication methods (c.f. Kraut, Patterson, Lundmark, Kiesler, Mukophadhyay, and Scherlis 1998).

Unlike telephone calls, e-mail is usually archived by the servers that send and receive messages, the nodes between corresponding users. In the United States, the legal precedent is that information on the server, or on machines owned by business or government, is owned by the owner of the machine and is not private information. E-mail correspondence may be subject to review by superiors, may be subpoenaed by courts, and may even be considered public records in some states. The privacy protection of telephone wiretapping laws was not extended to e-mail.

E-mail and listservs have become important tools for passing announcements and other information among members of existing face-to-face groups. Listservs are common forums for professional communications and announcements and are often used in classroom study groups to encourage open questioning and discussion. Researchers use listservs to disseminate new findings, share resources, locate grant programs, and even to recruit study participants.

For professional and other formal communications, e-mail has successfully facilitated social contact, social networking, and information distribution (Wellman and Gulia 1999). However, in private communications with family and close friends, e-mail has increased the amount of contact people have, but has not replaced the telephone or face-to-face meetings. People sometimes e-mail even to those they see daily. But they do not replace their visits with e-mail. This suggests that people are missing something when e-mailing to their close others. Perhaps it is the experience of seeing another’s face, or hearing another’s voice. It remains to be seen whether voiceor videoenhanced e-mail will become accepted as a face-to- face surrogate.

Usenet. Usenet, often called the Internet news facility, is a giant messaging system through which loosely organized thematic discussion takes place on-line. Worldwide, millions of users linked to hundreds of thousands of computer sites write messages that they post to one of more than 30,000 topical newsgroups. These posts are then

distributed by Usenet-serving computers to Usenet users. Usenet began in 1979 as a mail-drop messaging alternative to the then-exclusive ARPAnet (see earlier) but evolved into a broadcast-based medium on the Internet.

Usenet topical areas or newsgroups vary by seriousness, from the highly focused to the totally whimsical. Newsgroups with names like ‘‘sci.archaeology’’ or ‘‘comp.lang.c++’’ tend to be largely topic-oriented, while many others have no real purpose other than to offer forums for freewheeling electronic banter and disreputable, nuisance advertising. Newsgroups are loosely organized and vary considerably in their scope and traffic. There are newsgroups offering social support to the ill and grieving and newsgroups offering sexual information to the naive and inexperienced. Information on starting newsgroups is available in the newsgroup news.groups.

Users are not required to wade through thousands of newsgroups to find messages of interest. Most Web browsers now have news-reading functions, or specialized programs are available for this purpose. People typically subscribe to selected newsgroups that they want to examine regularly, so that when they go on-line they will see these 10 or 30 or 200 newsgroups, not 30,000. Messages posted to Usenet are organized in discussion threads, that is, messages related by reference to the same initial post or topic. Users may skip some threads on their subscribed newsgroups, reading only those threads of personal interest.

Usenet has a character similar to that of e- mail–based listservs, although its explicitly public nature gives it a somewhat different feel. Usenet newsgroups historically predate listservs, so that much of netiquette evolved from these public discussion forums. Admonitions against spam originated on Usenet, as did the tendency for people to flame norm violators and discussion rivals. Flaming involves posting a hostile and insulting message to the group, intended to shame the author of a prior post. Flaming may have had its origin in a puerile effort to enforce group norms, but it is just as often a deliberate attempt to violate them for shock value or amusement. A deliberate attempt to provoke a hostile response on Usenet is called trolling; trolling/flaming battles dominate some newsgroups.

Usenet norms are discussed and described in newsgroups devoted to this topic, and summaries are posted in news.announce.newsusers. Additionally, most newsgroups have a document called the Frequently Asked Questions list (the FAQ) that deals with local norms and standards. Beyond these formal statements, something not unlike a community character emerges and is maintained by regular participants in some newsgroups over time. New users, seeking to fit in there, need to go through a process of socialization first, usually by lurking and observing. Other newsgroups, however, are anarchic, and still others are abandoned and ignored.

Research has suggested that newsgroups provide a setting intermediate between the public and the private where stigmatized social identities can be established and supported. For example, McKenna and Bargh (1998) found that homosexuals who had never made their sexual orientation public found the courage to do so through social support on Usenet. In another domain, however, Mickelson (1997) found that mediated social support on Usenet was less helpful to parents of attentiondeficit/hyperactive children than face-to-face support in therapy groups. Researchers may investigate other socially unacceptable phenomena by identifying populations and soliciting volunteers on Usenet. Moreover, the messages posted to newsgroups are considered public behavior. As such, they offer a rich resource for social researchers. There is at least one important possible problem: Usenet users may be deceiving others in their self-presentations and in their messages. However, this problem permeates all self-report research and is not specific to Internet phenomena.

Chat. Computer chat evolved from grassroots networking attempts somewhat oblique to the development of the Internet. Chat was initially a feature of old-fashioned local bulletin-board systems (BBS), in which a system operator, or sysop, with (usually) a DOS PC allowed a dozen or so outside parties to dial in with modems and read Usenet-like delayed messages, or to communicate with each other in real time, by typing messages that appeared on the screen with labels indicating from whom they came. Some of the early national time-sharing services such as Compuserve offered this feature, too, often with a name like ‘‘CB simulator,’’ indicating the metaphor of the period,

citizen-band radio (CB). The idea was that people who were basically strangers would adopt ‘‘handles’’ (later called screen names) that concealed actual identity while advertising proclivities, and that these strangers would engage in streams of banter like CB radio operators out on the highway.

With the advent of mass-marketed national services such as AOL, Microsoft Network, and the like, chat facilities—now organized into topical areas or chat rooms—became one of the principal attractions. Chat and chat metaphors soon became second only to the World Wide Web as the public image of the Internet. Most users access chat facilities through commercial providers where it is implemented on private servers. There are also pure peer-to-peer Internet chat programs, such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), that don’t require a host chat provider. Participation in IRC and related free-floating chat is probably dwarfed by use of AOL and similar commercial services.

Like Usenet, topical options in chat are numerous and variously populated. Users interact in real-time with minimal constraints. As with Usenet, the degree of group norm enforcement in chat rooms varies from high to nonexistent. On commercial providers’ chat facilities, broad norms of conduct often are officially enforced by staff members and user volunteers. Other hand-me-downs from Usenet were adapted to the constraints of chat. For example, the chat equivalents of Usenet’s emoticons are one-letter abbreviations in angle brackets, like <g> for grin. Apparently, these are both easier to type and to parse than graphic emoticons when one is engaged in chat activity.

With the emergence of chat came a wave of real-life chatter about the development of close relationships between people who met on the Internet. People arranged marriages to others they had never met face-to-face but with whom they had chatted endlessly. The self-disclosure and narrow scope of interactions, as well as the sheer number of encounters, provided a fertile breeding ground for social relationships. Many marriages and friendships founded there have endured, while others have dissolved. While the surge of new relationships and the awe of onlookers have stabilized, chat shows no signs of losing popularity.

Another chat phenomenon, cybersex, involves graphic verbal descriptions of sex acts, exchanged

in real time by couples and groups. It is the Internet equivalent of a graphic romance novel, except it is interactive and participatory. Participants may selfstimulate while generating messages to other users. Touted as an opportunity to free the libido from social restriction and personal inhibition, users may engage in unusual acts with minimal personal risk. Cybersex has been controversial. Like arguments over pornography in print, issues of access and censorship remain unsettled as we enter the twenty-first century.

Research on chat has focused primarily on two aspects of chat: the effect of anonymity in chat rooms on the negotiation of social identity (Turkle 1995); and the development of community among interacting users (Wellman and Gulia 1999). Most of this research has involved qualitative analysis or sometimes merely impressionistic characterization of chat activity. Many case studies have been conducted that describe activity in novel chat rooms or the chat experiences of particular individuals. Like Usenet, some chat is public behavior that is ripe for empirical study.

Chat is engaging, just as conversation with similar others is engaging in face-to-face interactions. But with chat, users hear all the conversations in the room, not only their own. Moreover, self-presentations can be well controlled to avoid sharing unflattering information. For these reasons, some people become obsessed with chat activity and seem to develop a dependency on this type of social contact. Others, particularly those who are homebound, have found fulfillment of their social needs through chat. Chat seems to attract a different type of user, relative to Usenet. The chat user seeks the interaction, perhaps more than the information available from topical discussion. Usenet users may seek the information and prefer not to be distracted by the interaction.

Multi-User Domains (MUDs). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the Net was still in its infancy, the fantasy role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons swept through high schools and colleges. MUDs (Multi-User Domains or Multi-User Dungeons) originated as electronic platforms for similar fantasy games. They have become more elaborate and more free of goal-based game character as they have grown in popularity. They are based on different kinds of software (specified by names

such as MUSE, MOO, or MUSH) that can be accessed through the Internet.

Users, known as players, join MUDs through a command that connects their computer to the computer running the game program. Connection gives players access to a shared database of rooms, exits, and other virtual objects, which are created and manipulated through simple commands. Players create a character to play (called an avatar) by giving the character a name and a description, and enter rooms. Players interact with each other using simple commands such as ‘‘say’’ to talk to others in the room, ‘‘whisper’’ to talk to specific others, or ‘‘emote’’ for nonverbal expressions. Avatars grow and develop through interaction and game experience.

While some MUDs have graphical interfaces that allow characters and objects to be represented by icons, most interfaces so far have been textual. MUDs require the player’s imagination to create the objects, the actions, and the outcomes of the process. There is no necessary goal, and rules can be fluid. The interactions are the thing of interest. The Usenet news group rec.games.mud periodically lists Internet-accessible MUDs with their complete network addresses.

There has been tremendous interest in MUDs because they are the most unusual modality on the Internet, most different from RL, that is, real life. Avid players remain connected for days, cycling between RL and several different MUDs. Players may be especially susceptible to Internet dependency as some are drawn deeper into the fantasy world of the MUDs. There, identity is self-de- scribed and under the complete control of the player. One may be whoever one wishes to be. And actions are free of RL consequences, so freedom is perfected in the MUDs. Finally, anonymity is complete, with no means available to identify players in RL. These features allow MUDs to offer a utopian existence in a virtual world that is forever changing and changeable.

Researchers interested in the effects of simulation and role play on the development of identity are flocking to MUDs to investigate. Researchers interested in the effect of special types of relationships, or exposure to violence, on the family are also observing MUDs. And researchers interested in Internet dependence are focused on MUDs as well (e.g. Turkle 1995).

While interesting and entertaining environments, it may be premature to generalize findings based on observations of MUDs to other types of Internet experience. Although MUDs are anonymous, as are some chats, most Internet activity is identifiable and public. Although MUDs, and some chats, are user-created and malleable fantasy forums, most Internet activity is quite constrained both by norms and technical requirements, as well as considerations of cost and practicality. MUDs will likely continue to appeal to certain subpopulations, but they are not expected to become primary activities of Internet users. In fact, the trend at the turn of the century suggests that traditional games are becoming available as network software that can be shared and played interactively with others (Monopoly, bridge, Risk, etc.). They are appealing to a broad audience, both young and old. These games involve no avatars and no explicit fantasies about social identity. It is too early to tell whether they will compete effectively with MUDs for player time in RL.

World Wide Web (WWW). E-mail, Usenet, and chat facilities are to some extent immediate and ephemeral. They depend on user activity to generate their subject matter, and they require a constant stream—in the case of chat, a stream in real time. Other Internet-based facilities arose in an attempt to provide access to more fixed corpora of text: public-domain literature, programs, documents, and so forth.

Information protocols were an attempt to link data-storage facilities and user software to make Internet-based information search and retrieval convenient. A rudimentary form was File Transfer Protocol or FTP. FTP allowed external users to go to a foreign computer—if they knew where it was, what they were looking for, and how to sign on— and retrieve some of the files to which they were given access. Gopher, another information protocol, was similar in that it put selected parts of a computer file directory on the Net in a form suitable for browsing. A network of cooperating Gopher servers built a large-scale index of their total contents that was available as an entry point. Wide-Area Information Service (WAIS) was a more industrial-strength and business-oriented approach to the problem.

Gopher, WAIS, and to a significant extent most of the rest of the Internet have been superceded

by World Wide Web, a generalized hypertext facility that has submodalities corresponding to most other computer communication tasks. The idea of hypertext had been around since the 1960s—a computer-driven book with interconnected parts. Users could browse the hyperbook by following the linkages. Hypertext had been implemented on single computers or networks in various ways in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1990, at the European high-energy physics lab CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, Council for European Nuclear Research), Tim Berners-Lee developed a method of doing this over the Internet, which he called World Wide Web. WWW, or the Web as it is more often called, uses coded tags and descriptors (e.g. URLs, HTTP, HTML) to specify dynamic behaviors on a user’s computer screen when links are invoked. This selection opens a file or otherwise triggers an event, spilling information to the user’s screen.

WWW caught on explosively when inexpensive ISP access and Web service became widely available. Many individuals established WWW sites to describe their personal lives, their work, families, friends, and even their pets. For academics, Web sites typically described professional interests. Many course materials were posted to Web sites where students could retrieve them at any time. Businesses posted their personnel directories, and cities posted their public officials. Cinemas posted their playing times. It became a kind of instant, paperless desktop publishing mixed with features of a home broadcasting studio.

WWW is not socially interactive in the sense that e-mail or Usenet are interactive. Instead, interaction is scripted and restricted to some fixed set of user actions, somewhat like a video game. But the coupling of WWW with database applications and complicated scripting languages gave it a dynamic feel. Animations, sounds, and other types of sensory stimulus contribute to this feeling, and these frills will become the norm with Internet 2.

While mainstream business, institutions, and interest groups have WWW sites describing themselves, so do deviant interests. Because interaction is controlled by the Webmasters, criticism for deviance can be avoided. Militant and extremists groups, pornographers, and political interests abound and freely argue their unpopular opinions

on WWW. Issues of censorship and access restrictions, particularly for children, are largely unsettled.

Information is located on the Web by search engines that use logical operations to specify criteria for matching against hypertext found on registered servers. Different search engines, such as Yahoo or AltaVista, work with different subsets of WWW sites, so search results vary. Webmasters link together related sites and improve their odds of appearing in the search results of interested users. And respectable information is very prevalent, although sometimes difficult to distinguish from the propaganda. WWW does not provide a reference librarian or tour guide, and the only requirement to post information is access to a Web-serving computer. For this reason, educators were encouraged to emphasize strategies for evaluating source credibility and information integrity in their curricula, and researchers are scrambling to understand how people may effectively discern valid information.

Professionals already disseminate their research results and theories on WWW. Many electronic journals are available only on-line; some print journals are also publish electronically. Many researchers post their own work to a personal Web page for others to easily access and reference. However, publishing a work on the Web may interfere with journals’ claims to copyright on the same material, so many professional organizations are discouraging the posting of research papers prior to mainstream publication. Still, post-print abstracts and full-text articles are available in online databases and libraries. This wealth of information has made literature searching simpler and more useful than ever before.

Researchers have also established Web sites for data collections for studies of almost everything imaginable. Research materials (e.g., questionnaires, stimuli) are posted to a site accessed by a code provided by researchers to participants. Some studies simply recruit all comers to participation. Some research sites are scripted, so that the user follows a specified sequence of activities. Others require relatively few and simple actions. Participants prefer the convenience of WWW administrations to face-to-face meetings with researchers. But researchers cannot verify that participants are who they say they are, and some control over

the situation is lost. Early comparisons of pencil- and-paper questionnaires to WWW questionnaires found no differences in responding due to administrative mediums for short, self-report data where sampling was controlled (Kardas and Milford 1996).

WWW as a platform for propaganda, commerce, and entertainment has not been lost on the public. In fact, many people are betting large sums of money in development and investment that WWW is revolutionary. Already, users can read about a new vocalist, find her latest recording, listen to it, buy it, and order tickets to her upcoming concert—all accomplished in a few minutes without leaving home or waiting in lines! For many users, WWW has replaced their telephone books, mail-order catalogues, newspapers, and libraries, as all of this information is easily accessed on the Web.

Since live audio, live video, live telephone transmissions, and similarly active content can be transmitted and manipulated inside WWW, on the Internet, we would seem to have arrived at a stage at which function does not necessarily follow the network form. The old Internet, with textbased messaging and 48-hour relay turnarounds, seems hopelessly outdated, even quaint. What we’ve reached seems to be a stage of pure mediation: The Internet, through the mechanism of WWW, has the capacity to be a conduit for nearly any form of information, limited only by the available network bandwidth, transmission speed, and user patience. The extent to which the social conduct of life on the Net carries traces of its ancestry remains to be seen.

REFERENCES

Kardas, E. P., and T. M. Milford 1996 Using the Internet for Social Science Research and Practice. New York: Wadsworth.

King, J., R. E. Grinter, and J. M. Pickering 1997 ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Netville: The Saga of a Cyberspace Construction Boomtown in the Great Divide.’’ In S. Kiesler, ed., Culture of the Internet. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Kraut, R., M. Patterson, V. Lundmark, S. Kiesler, T. Mukophadhyay, and W. Scherlis 1998 ‘‘Internet Paradox: A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?’’ American Psychologist 53:1017–1031.

McKenna, K. Y. A., and J. A. Bargh 1998 ‘‘Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity ‘Demarginalization’

Through Virtual Group Participation.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75:681–694.

Mickelson, K. D. 1997 ‘‘Seeking Social Support: Parents in Electronic Support Groups.’’ In S. Kiesler, ed., Culture of the Internet. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Rheingold, H. 1993 The Virtual Community. New York:

HarperCollins.

Stoll, C. 1995 Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Doubleday.

Turkle, S. 1995 Life on the Screen. New York: SimonSchuster.

Wellman, B., and M. Gulia 1999 ‘‘Net-Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities.’’ In B. Wellman, ed., Networks in the Global Village. Oxford, England: Westview.

Men and women operate differently in the area of choosing people as being attractive. For example, men are more inclined to reject a person who disagrees with them than are women and more likely to choose the same type of person as a friend and as a marriage partner (Lindzay and Aronson 1969).

First impressions don’t necessarily last. Nisbett, reanalyzing Newcomb’s data in 1989, found that people’s liking of other people after sixteen weeks’ acquaintance was not predicted very well by their initial liking of these others after one week’s acquaintance (Nisbett and Smith 1989,p.72)

THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS OF INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION

DIANA ODOM GUNN

CHRISTOPHER W. GUNN

INTERPERSONAL

ATTRACTION

Everyone meets many people. With some, there is a natural fit; with other, there isn’t. Liking a person is quite different from liking chocolate or liking to ski. Liking someone implies feelings of warmth, intimacy, and consideration and a desire to spend time together. Interpersonal attraction plays a large part in the formation of all relationships except those into which a person is born, that is, all nonascriptive relationships. Everyone uses tactics that are expected to recruit potential partners; the specific tactics used in presenting oneself, as well as the characteristics an individual looks for in others, will vary depending on whether what is sought is friendship or love or a good working partner (McCall 1974). In earlier studies, questions of affiliation were confused with questions of attraction.You may be attracted to many people, but only those who are available in terms of physical proximity and who are defined as appropriate by social norms will actually become interaction partners (Berscheid and Reis 1998, p.204).

Even though liking someone is based on many factors that can’t always be defined, a person does know, upon meeting someone, whether he or she is in fact liked. This perceived liking in turn draws us toward the other (Sprecher and Hatfield 1992).

Homans, working from the perspective of exchange theory, states that people consider the rewards versus the costs of any potential relationship (Lindzay and Aronson 1969) and are attracted to those people who provide the most reward at the least cost. From this perspective, the ideal relationship is one in which both participants have equal costs and rewards, so that neither feels cheated or exploited. Newcomb asserts that frequency of interaction is an important determinant of attraction, a view known as the propinquity perspective. The basic assumption is that the more frequently one interacts with others, the more attractive they become. It is expected that frequency of interaction will lead to increasing similarity of beliefs and values and that this assumed similarity will in turn lead to increased attraction. This perspective ignores the possibility that getting to know a person better may actually reveal many differences (Lindzay and Aronson 1969). Despite the idea’s appeal to common sense, there is little evidence of increasing reciprocity of interpersonal attraction over time (Kenny and LaVoie 1982).

People do prefer those who are similar in background, interests, and values. They want to talk about things that interest them and do things familiar to them. A person who can provide social support by having similar beliefs and values is a likely potential friend. Despite the folk wisdom that opposites attract, similarity is more powerful than complementarity. The exceptions are those with strong needs on either end of the domi- nance–submission continuum or the nurturance– succorance continuum (Argyle 1969, p. 213); when

strong needs exist in these areas, complementarity is more powerful.

TRYING TO ATTRACT OTHERS

Though different factors come into play when one is evaluating someone as a potential friend or a potential work partner or a potential romantic partner, there seem to be inferred qualities that make a stranger appear to be likable or not likable. One study found that when videotapes of women were shown to males and females to judge, those most often chosen were apt to be described as sociable, cheerful, and positive emotionally; the underchosen were more apt to be described as negative and moody (Hewitt and Goldman 1982).

In a culture, like the United States, that values openness, psychological awareness, and emotional vulnerability, self-disclosure increases likability. Those who disclose little are less apt to be found attractive by others (Montgomery 1986).

Revealing yourself to another person is a sign that you like and trust them. It also signals that you trust them to respond appropriately. There seem to be three specific links between self-disclosure and attraction and likeability: (1) the more you disclose about yourself, the more you are liked; (2) people disclose more to those they initially like; and (3) the very act of disclosing makes you like the person to whom you disclosed (Collins and Miller 1994). A modern form of self-presentation that tells quite a bit about what people think makes them appear attractive is the personal ad. No longer are these dismissed as being for the desperate; rather, they are seen as just another way to introduce oneself. A study of the responses to different sets of physical characteristics referred to in ads showed that tall men and thin women received the greatest number of responses (Lynn and Shurgot 1984). In these ads it can also be seen that people present themselves as happy, able, capable, and very successful. It is interesting to note that the richer a man claims to be, the younger, taller, and prettier a woman he wants. The younger and prettier a woman presents herself as being, the more successful a man she wishes to meet.

FORMING RELATIONSHIPS

First meetings proceed cautiously. In every cultural group there are conventions about how long the

preliminaries must last. These conventions vary depending upon the age and gender of the participants, as well as where the meeting takes place. The goals of the encounter determine the interpersonal attraction tactics used. For example, when characteristics of potential dating partners were varied along two dimensions, physical attractiveness and personality desirability, undergraduate males chose physical attractiveness as the deciding variable (Glick 1985). Therefore, a female hoping for a date would find that increasing physical attractiveness would be more effective than showing what a nice personality she had. Not all inititial encounters develop into relationships. In general, whether the individual develops an expectation that future encounters will be rewarding is critical to the continuation of relationship. Several studies have shown that perceiving the relationship as being better than others’ relationships facilitates commitment to and satisfaction with the relationship (Rusbult et al. 1996).

Relationship satisfaction also positively correlates with evaluating your partner more positively than he or she evaluates self. Such evaluations are also positively related to more effectively resolving any conflicts that occur and thus to continuation of the relationship (Murray and Holmes 1996).

The goals of the encounter determine the interpersonal attraction tactics used. For example, when characteristics of potential dating partners were varied along two dimensions, physical attractiveness and personality desirability, undergraduate males chose physical attractiveness as the deciding variable (Glick 1985). Therefore, a female hoping for a date would find that increasing physical attractiveness would be more effective than showing what a nice personality she had.

PLAYING AND WORKING TOGETHER

Competition has an interesting relationship with interpersonal attraction. Rees found that during intragroup competition, football players reported the most liking and respect for those who played their own position yet outperformed them (Rees and Segal 1984). Riskin also found that males, when given background data indicating both the degree of competitiveness and the degree of work mastery in target males, rated the most competitive as most attractive, as long as they were also

seen as having ability. In addition, these competitive males were assumed by the male subjects to be more attractive to women (Riskin and Wilson 1982). Numerous studies have shown that emergent leaders are given high interpersonal-attrac- tion ratings by both sexes.

The workplace provides a setting where qualities of competitiveness, ability, and leadership are displayed. It might be assumed that this leads to the formation of romantic attachments. Though this does in fact occur, the work setting also provides for additional complexity in the handling of personal attraction. Attraction and intimacy must be seen in the context of outsiders’ view of the relationship. Attempts must be made to balance the demands of the job and those of the relationship. Role relationships within the workplace are expected to contain a degree of distance that is at odds with the demands of ‘‘getting closer.’’ Despite these problems, people do get romantically involved with co-workers. One study of 295 adults (average age: thirty-two) revealed that 84 had been involved in a romantic relationship with someone at work and 123 had been aware of a romance in their workplace. Such relationships are more likely to occur in less formal organizations, especially those that are very small or very large. The person most likely to enter into such a relationship is a female who is young, new, and of low rank (Dillard and Witteman 1985, p. 113).

FRIENDSHIP

Being perceived as friendly, pleasant, polite, and easy to talk to increases a person’s ability to attract potential friends. If in addition similar values, interests, and backgrounds are present, the likelihood of friendship is even greater (Johnson 1989). In ongoing relationships, friendship has nothing to do with the participants’ rating of each other’s physical appearance. Nevertheless, at the initial meeting stage a person judged as being too physically attractive will be avoided. In one study, sixty undergraduate males were shown a male target population (previously rated from 1 to 5 by a male and female sample) and were asked who among this group they would like to meet. The most attractive were chosen less frequently; they were judged to be more egocentric and less kind. It was the moderately attractive who were seen as being the type of person most of the subjects would like

to meet. Explaining these findings in terms of exchange theory, one would say that most people rate themselves as bringing moderate attractiveness to a relationship and feel that extreme attractiveness throws off the equality (Gailucci 1984).

Though it is often assumed that young people do not see older people as potential friends, a review of forty research reports reveals that perceived agreement in attitudes tends to neutralize young adults’ general perception of older adults as unattractive. Elders may perceive young people as attractive or unattractive, but they still prefer to associate with individuals who are middle-aged or older (Webb et al. 1989).

SEXUAL ATTRACTION AND ROMANTIC

RELATIONSHIPS

While males and females alike differ in their ability to distinguish between friendly and sexually interested behavior, males are more likely to see sexual intent where females see only friendly behavior. When shown videotapes of five couples, each showing a male and a female behaving in either a friendly or a sexually interested way, males consistently saw more sexual intent (Shotland and Craig 1988).

Men and women also differ as to the relative importance of physical features and personal qualities in determining the choice of romantic partners. Even though both sexes rated personal qualities as being more important than physical features, males placed greater emphasis on the physical than did women (Nevid 1984). Despite this, there seems to be a point at which attempting to increase physical appeal by dressing to reveal the body has a negative effect on one’s appeal as a marital partner. Hill reports that when male and female models wore very tight clothes that displayed a great deal of skin, they were rated as being very attractive as potential sex partners but their marital potential was lowered. High-status dressing had the opposite effect for both males and females: Ratings of physical, dating, sexual, and marital attractiveness all increased as the status of clothing increased (Hill et al. 1987).

A shared sense of humor is another important component of loving and liking. When a humor

test comprising cartoons, comic strips, and jokes was given to thirty college couples, along with a test that measured how much the partners loved and liked each other, a strong correlation between shared humor and a predisposition to marry was found (Murstein and Brust 1985). It can probably be assumed that the shared humor comes before the relationship, as well as serving as a factor that enhances it. How people feel about their romance at any given time tends to cause them to rewrite history. For example: When people involved in romantic relationships were asked, once a year for four years, to describe how the relationship had changed during the past year, it was found that current feelings had more to do with the ratings that actual changes (Berscheid and Reis 1998, p. 211).

(SEE ALSO: Courtship: Exchange Theory; Love; Mate Selection Theories; Personal Relationships; Social Psychology)

Kenny, David A., and Lawrence LaVoie 1982 ‘‘Reciprocity of Interpersonal Attraction: A Confirmed Hypothesis.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 45:54–58.

Lindzay, Gardner, and Elliot Aronson 1969 The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 3. Reading, Mass.: Addi- son-Wesley.

Lynn, Michael, and Barbara A. Shurgot 1984 ‘‘Responses to Lonely Hearts Advertisements: Effects of Reported Physical Attractiveness, Physique, and Coloration.’’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

10:349–357.

McCall, George J. 1974 ‘‘A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Attraction.’’ In T. L. Huston, ed., Foundation of Interpersonal Attraction. New York: Academic Press.

Montgomery, Barbara 1986 ‘‘Interpersonal Attraction as a Function of Open Communication and Gender.’’ Communication Research Reports 3:140–145.

Murstein, Bernard I., and Robert G. Brust 1985 ‘‘Humor and Interpersonal Attraction. Journal of Personality Assessment 49:637–640.

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Berscheid, Ellen, and Harry T. Reis 1998 ‘‘Attraction and Close Relationships.’’ In D.T. Gilbert et. al., eds.,

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ARDYTH STIMSON

INTERPERSONAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Most of us understand conflict as a negative aspect of social interactions and therefore are inclined to avoid it if possible. Yet theorists contend that conflict is an inevitable part of human association and, to some extent, a necessary one (Straus 1979). In fact, conflict, either intrapsychic or interpersonal, is a pivotal concept in theories of human development (Shantz 1987). Even with its acknowledged importance in human development, however, research on conflict has been relatively recent. This may perhaps have been due to the perception of conflict as largely a negative occurrence and the equating of conflict with aggression (Shantz 1996). If interpersonal conflict is not aggression, what is it? How do individuals respond to interpersonal conflict? What is our theoretical understanding of individual behavior in interpersonal conflict, and what are the factors that are related to how individuals resolve conflicts with others? This entry addresses the above questions with a focus on childhood and adolescence. The term conflict will refer to interpersonal conflict unless otherwise stated.

WHAT IS CONFLICT?

Interpersonal conflict is an event that occurs between two individuals in the course of interactions. Thus, it requires at least two individuals for conflict to occur; conflict is not an attribute of a single individual (Shantz 1987). According to conflict theory, which draws from symbolic interactionism, exchange theory, and systems theory, conflict is defined as ‘‘a confrontation between individuals, or groups, over scarce resources, controversial means, incompatible goals, or combinations of these’’ (Sprey 1979, p. 134). From the sociolinguistic perspective, conflict is a ‘‘social activity, created and conducted primarily by means of talking’’ (Garvey and Shantz 1992, p. 93). Thus, the main elements of conflict are an interactional

context, which is at least dyadic, and the presence of behavioral opposition (Joshi 1997).

An important condition for sustained interactions is the maintenance of interpersonal equilibrium. Conflict causes disequilibrium, and the individuals involved in the conflict can use different ways to move the interactions to an equilibrium. These different ways are conflict resolution strategies and can be defined as ‘‘sets of behaviors that seem to subserve a social goal. They may be either conscious, planned means to forseeable ends (as these terms usually connote), or unconscious, automatic or habitual behaviors that have the effect of subserving goals’’ (Shantz 1987, p. 289).

THEORETICAL MODELS RELATED TO INTERPERSONAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION

There are two theoretical models that attempt to explain how individuals respond in conflict situa- tions—the social information processing model and the interpersonal negotiation skills model. The social information processing model focuses on the intraindividual cognitive processes that take place in social situations. The INS model, on the other hand, describes the developmental changes in conflict resolution strategies that cooccur with cognitive changes.

Social Information Processing. According to the social information processing model (Dodge et al. 1986), individuals go through a set of steps in which they process social information contained in social situations. However, the person is generally not aware of these information-processing steps. The individual must respond skillfully at every step to successfully negotiate the situation. The first step is to encode the social cues in the situation, which means that the person assesses the situation in terms of what exactly is happening. The next step is to interpret the cues in the light of previous knowledge, thus forming mental representations of the cues. Thus, the understanding of the situation—why is this conflict happening? why is the other person behaving in this way?—is constructed. Once the cues are interpreted, the individual must generate possible ways of responding to the situation, which in conflict situations would be conflict resolution strategies. This is followed