Learn about why opposites don’t really attract; the “propinquity effect” and how physical distance affects the way we feel about other people; and the history of when and why we started using last names.
Learn about why opposites don’t really attract; the “propinquity effect” and how physical distance affects the way we feel about other people; and the history of when and why we started using last names.
Opposites Don’t Attract by Kelsey Donk
We Like What’s Physically Close to Us by Mae Rice
The History of Last Names by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Gregory)
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/do-opposites-really-attract
CODY GOUGH: Season's gratings. Were wrapping up the year with a look back at your favorite episodes of 2020.
NATALIA REAGAN: Enjoy this Curiosity Daily classic and stay subscribed for brand new episodes starting January 1.
ASHLEY HAMER: We'll see you in 2021.
CODY GOUGH: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about why opposites don't really attract and how physical distance affects the way we feel about other people. We'll wrap up with a listener question about when and why we started using last names.
CODY GOUGH: Let's get us fast and curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're releasing this episode on Valentine's Day. So we just had to get into some relationship research. Starting with that old saying, that opposites attract. The idea that, maybe, creative types fall for analytical types or messy people end up with tidy people, well, I've got some news for you. Science says that idea is a big old myth. According to research, we're most attracted to people who have similar attitudes, personalities, interests, and values to our own. That's right.
We love to tell ourselves that opposites attract, but since the 1950s, social scientists have conducted more than 240 studies to determine whether similarity or difference is what most leads to attraction. In 2013, two psychologists looked at all the results of these studies put together in a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. What they found was pretty conclusive.
There's a strong undeniable association between being similar to another person and being attracted to that person. In other words, there is, essentially, no research evidence that differences in personality, interests, education, politics, upbringing, religion, or other traits lead to greater attraction. Opposites do not attract.
In one study, researchers found that when given a choice of potential partner, college students chose descriptions that match their ideal selves over their opposites. Another study found that introverts aren't more attracted to extroverts. We might think that we're looking for someone to complement our strengths and support our weaknesses, but we're actually most attracted to people who share our traits.
But if these rules of attraction are so true, why do we still seem to think opposites attract? Well, for one thing, differences stand out more than similarities do. A couple might have 100 similar traits and two contrasting ones and they'll still end up arguing about how different they are. Also, some research has shown that over time, people change to complement their partners.
People might start out as very alike, but over time, the partner who makes slightly more jokes will become the funny one and the other will become the serious one. In the end, it's what we share with our partners that's important. So lean into this law of attraction. You're probably looking for someone who's pretty similar to yourself. And that's just fine.
CODY GOUGH: According to psychology research, Mr. or Mrs. Wright might as well be Mr. or Mrs. Wright here. Because new research is strengthening the old idea that desirable people appear to be more attractive when they're nearby than when they're further away. And I mean like 2 feet further away.
The idea that we like desirable objects more when they're closer is what scientists call the propinquity effect. And it's a mainstay in introductory psychology classes. Despite that, there really hasn't been much evidence for it. Studies do suggest that thirsty people perceive bottles of water to be nearer and lonely people perceive other people to be closer by, but studies haven't really shown this in the other direction.
It makes intuitive sense, especially, for something simple like a hamburger. The closer it is to your mouth, the more you want to eat it. But for people, interpersonal attraction is a little more complex than your lunch is. So this new study tackled exactly that. It focused on men and how their perceptions of women shifted with proximity. The researchers found that men responded more positively to women who were closer to them-- whether they were having in-person interactions or looking at digital representations of them.
So for one part of the study, for instance, the men rehearsed lines from a musical version of Romeo and Juliet with an unknown woman. She was actually a performer hired by the researchers. The woman sat either 3 or 5 feet away, and the men found her more appealing when she sat closer.
The same thing happens when men watched a video or the woman looking straight into the camera. They found her more likable when she was positioned closer to the lens. And researchers think this all boils down to something pretty simple. Proximity is a signal of openness to and interest in connecting.
That could be either platonically or sexually. Although the researchers didn't ask the study participants about their sexual orientation, the preference for proximity was, especially, strong for men who were single or felt dissatisfied with their social lives. So in the end, people might not be so different from hamburgers. The closer they are, the more attractive they look. For your next dating profile pic, maybe you want to zoom in.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Gregory who asks, "When and why did we start using last names?" I believe it was due to crafts or skills such as being a blacksmith and people having the name, then, Smith or Blacksmith and Cooper and similar. But at the time of Jesus, if you look at the Bible, we don't really use last names.
For the most part, people are associated with place names. Great question, Gregory. You're absolutely right. That back before we had official surnames, people were named for their occupation or the place. they came from. It was, basically, like, if you were to tell a friend about your day and you said, I had lunch with Sarah, and your friend goes, Sarah from college? And you go, no, no, no. Sarah from yoga class. If you only knew one Sarah, just saying Sarah would suffice.
In the same way, these extra descriptors or by-names became more necessary as the population increased. At first, those by-names just stayed with the one person. They weren't passed down to his children. But as societies became more complex, those by-names stuck around and turned into surnames. So all the kids of John the weaver got the last name of Weaver. Exactly when this happened differs widely depending on where you're talking about.
In England, it started between the 11th and 13th centuries after the Norman conquest. William I gave pieces of his newly conquered land to his buddies and they named themselves after their land. Eventually, that surname trend trickled down to the peasant classes. China, on the other hand, has been passing down family names for thousands of years. The first Chinese surnames may have been passed down by mothers, not fathers. Though by about 1000 BC, that trend had reversed.
One of the most recent cultures to adopt family names, though, is very relevant to your question. Jewish families did not take on surnames until a few years ago. And not for happy reasons. Sephardic Jews did it in 1492 as a way to retain their community identity once they were kicked out of Spain. Ashkenazi Jews, meanwhile, were required to take on surnames in the late 1700s when the Austro-Hungarian empire and later tsarist Russia started registering their Jewish citizens.
But these days, surnames are in pretty wide use all over the world, even if they might come in a different form or hail from different origins. Thanks for your question, Gregory. If you have a question, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com or leave a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
CODY GOUGH: And that is the correct phone number, by the way, this week. Sorry, again, for saying the wrong one last week. 312-596-5208. Before we recap what we learned today, here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Next week, you'll learn about why beauty sleep actually is a real thing, how plants talk to worms for self defense, why bosses should let employees surf the web at work, and more.
CODY GOUGH: Plus you'll hear the final part of our interview with Engineer Hugo Fruehauf and you'll also hear from Neuroscientist and Bestselling Author Daniel Levitin who will give you practical evidence-based guidance for living longer and better. As for right now, let's recap what we learned today, starting with the fact that opposites do not attract. So stop looking for love in all the wrong places.
ASHLEY HAMER: You might be different than your partner, but you're mostly the same, probably.
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
ASHLEY HAMER: And we learned about the propinquity effect. The fact that desirable objects are more desirable the closer they are, which is such a simple thing, right? Like I just like this thing because it's closer to me, wow.
CODY GOUGH: And that is why back in my dating days, every single time I went on a first date, I would pick a place where I could sit next to the person I was on a date with.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, that's a good strategy.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. If you go to a bar, you can either sit at the bar or sometimes they've got like a counter lined up against the window. You can sit there so your stools are next to each other. Coffee shop, same thing. Yeah. Sitting across the table from the person, I just-- I mean, and to be fair, it never helped. I was bad at first dates. It just is a general rule.
ASHLEY HAMER: Who is good at first dates?
CODY GOUGH: That's true. That's true.
ASHLEY HAMER: Gosh.
CODY GOUGH: Look, I am not saying I'm a Casanova here. It's just not like-- I'm not like the Ladies Man from Saturday Night Live, OK?
ASHLEY HAMER: Go get a fifth sandwich.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. None of that. None of that. But perhaps, it'll help. To sit just a little bit closer to that special someone, if you want them to be special. Oh, and I also learned that we have last names for lots of different reasons-- depending on where you live, where your heritage is. But we pretty much all have them now, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Governments tend to like it because it helps them keep their citizens organized.
CODY GOUGH: Didn't you try to find the origins of my last name when you were researching this?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yeah. That's right. So there's this website called forebears.io, you can find it in the show notes. Your surname comes from Welsh, but you're not Welsh.
CODY GOUGH: Not to my knowledge.
ASHLEY HAMER: It says, it means the red complexioned. It says one of the very few nicknames that can be found among Welsh surnames. So you're not like a weaver or a baker, you're just--
CODY GOUGH: I mean, I'm a redditor.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's lame. You're lame.
CODY GOUGH: What is your last name from?
ASHLEY HAMER: Wales. And I do have Welsh heritage. It's just from a geographical locality of Hammer-- a village in the parish of Rochdale, Lancashire-- I don't know how to say these things. It's just from a place. It's a village. I don't know.
CODY GOUGH: You'll have to visit to figure out how to pronounce it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Add it to the list. All I know is that when I go somewhere and people see my name written down in the US, they always think it's Gough, but if I'm in Europe, whenever I'm traveling, they always know it's Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Whenever I made a music store, people know that it's Hamer and not Hamer because there's a guitar named hamer.
CODY GOUGH: That's actually why we say our names at the start of this podcast. Just so people can pronounce them right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, we both have hard-to-pronounce names. So--
CODY GOUGH: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Mae Rice, and Kelsey Dunk, and edited by Ashley Hamer who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Today's episode was scripted and edited by Cody Gough.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Wow. You are so pleased with yourself.
ASHLEY HAMER: I am. Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Have a great weekend and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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