On the Complexity of a Seemingly ‘Simple Attitude Similarity–Attraction Relation’

Byrne’s (1971) attraction paradigm was a novel perspective on how to conduct programmatic research in social psychology. Once a base relation between a stimulus (S) and the response (R) is established: R = f (S), research can be directed at (a) refining the base relation (analytic research), (b) replacing the original S by a new one (stimulus generality), (c) replacing the original R by new ones (response generality) and (d) theory building (i.e., explaining the S–R relations and generating new predictions). In this article, the author presents (1) an overview of the attraction paradigm and (2) the recent literature on mediators of the attitude similarity–attraction relation to show that what originally seemed to be a ‘simple causal relation’ is hardly so. There are five mediators (i.e., Validation → Positive affect → Respect → Inferred attraction → Trust) of the attitude similarity–attraction relation.