We’ve all heard the adage “familiarity breeds contempt.” But does it really?
A body of research actually suggests that familiarity breeds liking, but clearly sometimes it does the opposite. So when does getting to know more about a person make us like them more and when does it make us like them less?
First, let’s define what we mean by "familiarity." Typically, it’s defined as the quantity of exposure to someone, not the quality. In research terms, this can mean a number of things. Sometimes it’s how many times participants see a particular person’s face during a session in the lab. Sometimes, it can be how many of a person's traits they learn about. Other times it can be how much time someone has lived with a new college roommate.1
There is a lot of evidence that the more we’re exposed to something, the more we come to like it.2 If you keep seeing a particular painting in your office, you will eventually start liking it more. This can also affect how much we like people. In one famous experiment, the more often a young woman attended a large lecture class (without ever speaking to her classmates), the more likely her classmates were to rate her as likable when viewing her photograph at the end of the semester.3
But what happens when we actually interact with people, rather than merely being exposed to them?
Physical proximity does turn out to be a major predictor of whom we marry or befriend. Even small distances, like whether or not someone lives next door to you in an apartment complex rather than at the end of the hall, affects how likely you are to become friends.4 In lab studies, the more strangers were asked to disclose to one another, the more they liked each other.5 But the same famous study that found that most off-campus apartment-dwellers had best friends in the same building also found that most people’s enemies were in the same building, too.4 And when strangers are paired randomly as college roommates, the longer they live together, the less they like one another.6,7
The type of information we get as we become more familiar with someone is likely to be a major factor in how familiarity affects liking. According to Norton and colleagues, ambiguity leads to liking because we often give people the benefit of the doubt when we first meet. However, once we get more information, we start to discover things we don’t like about the person.8 But sometimes that additional information could increase liking.
There are three general ways of understanding the link between familiarity and attraction:1
- First, familiarity may increase liking due to uncertainty-reduction. That is, we’re not sure if we can totally trust the unfamiliar, and a certain wariness with strangers is an important survival mechanism, from an evolutionary perspective.
- Second, people may have greater fluency with familiar objects, places, and people, so they’re just more comfortable with familiar people and find it easier to deal with them.
- Finally, it’s possible that greater exposure leads to boredom, as we tire of things when we’re overexposed to them.
Recently, Finkel and colleagues suggested that the key to understanding when familiarity is good or bad lies in understanding the stage of relationship development and the situation in which people are interacting. They identified three relationship stages:1
- Awareness. At this stage, you know who the person is, but you haven’t actually interacted with them and you’re not sure if any relationship will develop. For example, you might see a fellow student in a college classroom and know she is enrolled in the class too, but you’ve never talked to her.
- Surface contact. You’ve interacted with the person, but you’re not yet in a relationship and you’re not sure what the future holds. So you’ve started talking to your classmate and interacting with her during class on a regular basis, but you don’t know if you will ultimately become friends.
- Mutuality. By this stage, you’re in an established relationship that is interdependent—what one person does directly impacts the other. Now you’ve formed a close friendship with your classmate and you decide to move in together in an off-campus apartment.
The effects of familiarity may differ at different relationship stages. It will also depend on how appealing that new information is, and on whether or not you find yourself trying to cooperate or compete with the other person.1
At the awareness stage, you haven’t had much of a chance to interact, so you may be more concerned with whether or not the facts you’re learning about the person seem to add up to a coherent whole. As you interact more, you’re more focused on how well you get along with the person, so the specific bits of information you’re getting matter less. As you get to know the person in the surface contact stage, it’s possible that you could get bored if you stop learning new information, and things could become predictable. Once you reach mutuality, there are more chances to cooperate and have important shared experiences (like taking a road trip together), but there are also more opportunities for conflict (like arguments over cleaning duties with a roommate).
So the reasons why familiarity sometimes increases liking and sometimes decreases it may depend on your relationship stage.1
Of course, this model only scratches the surface of really understanding the link between familiarity and attraction. Many questions are still unanswered:
- How familiarity affects liking may depend on what your expectations are for the type of relationship you could have with a person you’ve just met.
- Exposure to a person can make them more familiar, but that’s different than actually acquiring new information.
- Finally, there’s a difference between being around a person a lot over a short period of time and spending a lot of time with someone because you’ve known them for a long time, like a next door neighbor you’ve had for 10 years.1
So, does familiarity breed contempt? The answer isn’t simple: You need to understand the relationship stage, the situation in which people are interacting, and the type of information that is gained as familiarity increases.
Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at Albright College, who studies relationships and cyberpsychology. Follow her on Twitter for updates about social psychology, relationships, and online behavior. Read more articles by Dr. Seidman on Close Encounters.
References
1 Finkel, E. J., Norton, M. I., Reis, H. T., Ariely, D., Caprariello, P. A., Eastwick, P. W., Forst, J. H., & Maniaci, M. R. (2015). When does familiarity promote versus undermine interpersonal attraction? A proposed integrative model from erstwhile adversaries. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(1) 3–19.
2 Zajonc, R. B. (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the subliminal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 224–228.
3 Moreland, R. L., & Beach, S. (1992). Exposure effects in the classroom: The development of affinity among students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 255–276.
4 Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social pressures in informal groups: A study of a housing community. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
5 Reis, H. T., Maniaci, M. R., Caprariello, P. A., Eastwick, P. W., & Finkel, E. J. (2011a). Familiarity does indeed lead to attraction in live interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 557–570.
6 Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Interracial roommate relationships: An experimental field test of the contact hypothesis. Psychological Science, 19, 717–723.
7. West, T. V., Pearson, A. R., Dovidio, J. F., Shelton, J. N., & Trail, T. (2009). Superordinate identity and intergroup roommate friendship development. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1266–1272.
8 Norton, M. I., Frost, J. H., & Ariely, D. (2007). Less is more: The lure of ambiguity, or why familiarity breeds contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 97–105.
Closing photo credit: Fernando Mafra via flickr.com
