The Person or Organization °mg- Mating It Points of View or Opin- Ions Stated Do Not Necessarily Represent Official Office of Edu Cation Position or Policy Personalism and Interpersonal Attraction

Attribution theory predicts that actions seen as specifically directed toward a person have greater impact than those not so directed. It was hypothesized that agreement between self-evaluation and another's evaluation increases personalism of received evaluations, increasing both impact and tendency to reciprocate liking or disliking. In a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design, 66 subjects received a high or low score on two tests of social insight. Each subject then received evaluations, supposedly from another subject, indicating (1) the partner estimated the subject's social insight as well above or below average, and (2) the partner liked the subject very much or disliked him moderately. Liking for the partner was the dependent variable. Results supported the experimental hypothesis; a significant < .001) three-way interaction effect was observed. PERSONALISM AND INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION1 David A. Potter 2 Educational Testing Service Feelings toward others significantly depend on our perception of others' response to us. Generally, we like those who like us and dislike those who dislike us. So pervasive Tr-thn tendency at Jones and Gerard (1967) consider others' feelings toward us to be "a major determinant of attraction to particular other persons [p. 283] "; exchange theorists like Blau (1964) and Homans (1961) also emphasize social approval in explaining interpersonal attraction. But this tendency toward liking reciprocity is not universal. The effects of received liking or disliking have been shown to be attenuated by such variables as inconsistency (Deutsch & Solomon, 1959); the attribution of an ulterior motive to the other person (Dickoff, 1961); and comparison to previous levels of received liking (Aronson & Linder, 1965). One factor mediating reactions to received affect may be the perceived locus of causality of that affect. Heider's (1958) seminal work in attribution theory, and its extension by Jones and Davis (1965), suggest that reactions to liking or disliking may be mediated by the perception of that affect as being caused by the self ("he likes me for what I am") or by the other ("he dislikes me because he is a misogynist"). This idea, most clearly expressed in Jones and Davis' (1965) concept of personalism, is that the impact of one person's (0's) actions upon another (P) is greatest when that action is seen by P as contingent upon his own characteristics. The tendency toward liking reciprocity, then, would be strongest when the liking or disliking received is personalistic (attributed by P to his own characteristics)