It's true: Be nice to others, and others will be nice to you

(NOVEMBER 12, 2021) When two people meet for the first time, they tend to see the other person as having a similar personality to their own. A friendly and sociable person will tend to see others as friendly and sociable. Someone who is shy and reserved will see those characteristics in others. In the world of psychology, this is known as the “assumed similarity effect.”

Now psychologists from the University of Oregon have more ideas. They say people reciprocate each other’s behavior. To reciprocate means to do the same thing to someone that they have done to you. For example, a person who acts friendly and sociable is more likely to get the same in return. In other words, people temporarily get behavior that is like their own personality. When they see that behavior, they guess that it is what the other person is like. Researchers call this the “perceiver-elicited similarity effect.”

Their research also found a dissimilarity effect. That means that assertive, dominant people bring out passive behavior in others, and passive people bring out assertive behavior. In other words, one action can lead to the opposite action from the other person.

The research was published last summer in academic journals. The main author is Bradley Hughes, a doctoral student. His co-authors are Professor Sanjay Srivastava and former student John Flournoy.

“The idea is [that] people influence each other when they interact,” Srivastava said. “They bring out behaviors in the other person that are in some ways predictably similar, and in others, predictably dissimilar.”

To test their theory, the psychologists conducted an experiment. They recruited 322 students, split them into pairs, and asked them to review and jointly judge a series of photographs depicting works of art. The participants assumed the roles of co-managers of an art gallery. They were given 20 minutes to review 20 paintings and select three to hang in the gallery.

“The idea is that personality flows through interpersonal interactions, from who a person is, to how they act, to how others respond to them,” Hughes said.

“You go through life making people a little more like you,” Srivastava said. “The implication is [that when] you have an interaction, you make people more like you. And you see that. This builds up over time. Your world view of what people are like is based on your own personality because of what you bring out in them.”

“You can influence your impressions of others by interacting with them,” Hughes said. “Everyday interactions change how you see people. Evidence of these effects opens doors for future studies exploring interpersonal influences on other social cognitive effects.”