Chapter 12 Quiz: Cognitive Biases in Attraction

Instructions: Answer all questions. For multiple choice, choose the single best answer unless otherwise noted. For short answer questions, write 2–4 sentences unless a different length is specified.

Question 1

Robert Zajonc's research on the mere exposure effect found that participants rated stimuli more positively after repeated exposure — even when they had no conscious memory of prior exposure. What does this finding suggest about the relationship between attraction and deliberate, conscious evaluation?

  • A) Attraction is primarily a deliberate, conscious process that can be fully explained by reasoning
  • B) Familiarity-based liking operates largely below the threshold of conscious awareness, suggesting that some attraction is constructed rather than perceived
  • C) Conscious recognition of prior exposure is a necessary condition for familiarity to influence liking
  • D) Zajonc's findings apply only to nonsense syllables and Chinese characters, not to human faces

Correct answer: B Explanation: Zajonc's most striking finding was that the exposure effect held even without conscious recognition of the prior stimuli, suggesting that it operates via processing fluency at a pre-reflective level.

Question 2

In the Dutton and Aron (1974) bridge study, men who crossed a frightening suspension bridge were more likely to call an attractive research assistant than men who crossed a stable bridge. What theoretical mechanism did the researchers invoke to explain this finding?

  • A) The mere exposure effect — they had been exposed to the experimenter multiple times
  • B) Misattribution of arousal — fear-induced physiological arousal was attributed to romantic interest
  • C) The halo effect — fear made the experimenter seem more attractive by contrast
  • D) Confirmation bias — men expected to find women on the bridge attractive

Correct answer: B Explanation: Dutton and Aron drew on Schachter and Singer's two-factor theory of emotion. The men's racing hearts and physiological arousal, originally caused by the bridge, were attributed to the experimenter when she became salient, and this misattributed arousal was experienced as attraction.

Question 3

The halo effect in attraction research refers to:

  • A) The tendency to be attracted to people who are similar to us in values and personality
  • B) The increased liking that results from repeated exposure to a stimulus
  • C) The tendency to infer multiple positive qualities from a single salient positive trait, such as physical attractiveness
  • D) The decrease in perceived attractiveness that follows prolonged relationship familiarity

Correct answer: C Explanation: The halo effect, documented by Thorndike (1920), describes how a positive global impression in one domain (physical attractiveness) generates positive attributions across unrelated domains (intelligence, trustworthiness, warmth).

Question 4

The "opposites attract" belief is best described by the research literature as:

  • A) A well-supported empirical finding, particularly for long-term relationship satisfaction
  • B) A myth largely contradicted by consistent evidence for the similarity-attraction effect
  • C) True for personality traits but false for attitude similarity
  • D) True in early attraction but reversed in established relationships

Correct answer: B Explanation: Decades of research on similarity and attraction — from Newcomb's housing studies to contemporary Big Five personality research — find consistently that similarity, not complementarity, predicts attraction. The perception of "opposite" appeal may reflect selective attention to surface differences while ignoring deeper value similarity.

Question 5

Construal Level Theory (CLT) predicts that we idealize potential romantic partners we have not yet met because:

  • A) We have confirmed positive information about them from social networks
  • B) Psychological distance leads to abstract, high-level representation that emphasizes desirable features and suppresses inconvenient concrete details
  • C) The halo effect from photographs extends to personality trait inferences
  • D) Scarcity increases perceived value, and unmet partners are scarcer than current partners

Correct answer: B Explanation: CLT, developed by Trope and Liberman and applied to attraction by Eastwick and colleagues, proposes that psychologically distant targets (including unmet potential partners) are represented at a high construal level — abstractly, in terms of their best features — producing idealization that concrete encounter cannot sustain.

Question 6

Research on the contrast effect in attraction consistently finds that:

  • A) People are more attracted to partners who contrast strongly with their own appearance
  • B) Exposure to highly attractive individuals immediately before an attraction judgment decreases ratings of average-attractiveness targets
  • C) The contrast effect is stronger in long-term relationships than in initial attraction
  • D) Contrast effects operate only when the comparison target is explicitly pointed out

Correct answer: B Explanation: Kenrick and Gutierres (1980) demonstrated this with media exposure, and subsequent research has replicated the finding: using highly attractive individuals as an implicit comparison standard depresses attractiveness ratings of others.

Question 7

In the Okafor-Reyes preliminary cognitive bias data, which biases showed the highest degree of cross-cultural consistency (robust across all twelve country samples)?

  • A) The scarcity effect and the contrast effect
  • B) Projection and construal-level idealization
  • C) The halo effect and the mere exposure effect
  • D) Confirmation bias and the endowment effect in relationships

Correct answer: C Explanation: The Okafor-Reyes data showed large, consistent effect sizes for the halo effect and mere exposure across all twelve countries — consistent with these being foundational features of human social cognition. Other biases showed substantially more cross-cultural variability.

Question 8

The scarcity effect in attraction is exploited by which specific Tinder design feature described in Case Study 12.2?

  • A) The use of profile photographs rather than text descriptions
  • B) The use of limited daily swipes, creating artificial resource scarcity
  • C) The algorithmic matching of similar users
  • D) The display of mutual friends on profiles

Correct answer: B Explanation: Limited daily swipes (or a finite "boost" window) creates artificial scarcity by rationing users' access to the resource of potential connections. This activates the scarcity heuristic: things that are limited in availability seem more valuable.

Question 9 (Short Answer)

Explain the concept of projection in attraction research. In your answer, distinguish it from the similarity-attraction effect, and explain why projection might be considered both adaptive (helpful) and maladaptive (harmful) in early relationship development.

Model answer: Projection in attraction refers to the tendency to attribute one's own attitudes and values to someone one finds attractive — effectively "reading in" compatibility that may not actually be there. It differs from the similarity-attraction effect, which is a real preference for similar others; projection is a cognitive error in perceiving similarity where it may not exist. Projection can be adaptive early in attraction because it sustains interest long enough for genuine relationship development to occur; it is maladaptive when the gap between projected and actual compatibility is large, leading to painful disillusionment or poor relationship choices.

Question 10 (Short Answer)

What is the methodological criticism most often leveled at the Dutton and Aron bridge study? Does this criticism mean we should dismiss the misattribution of arousal hypothesis entirely? Explain.

Model answer: The primary methodological criticisms include: small sample size, between-subjects design (different people on different bridges, not the same people under different conditions), absence of direct physiological measurement, and a behavioral dependent variable (calling the experimenter) that is ambiguous and subject to many confounds. Replication attempts have produced mixed results. However, these criticisms do not warrant dismissing the misattribution of arousal hypothesis — the theoretical framework (Schachter and Singer's two-factor emotion theory) is supported by independent research, and partial replications suggest the effect exists under some conditions. The bridge study is best treated as a compelling demonstration of a real principle rather than a definitive empirical proof.

Question 11

Which of the following best describes the debiasing challenge identified in section 12.15?

  • A) Knowledge of cognitive biases reliably eliminates their influence on judgment because awareness disrupts System 1 processing
  • B) Cognitive biases are primarily System 2 phenomena and can be corrected with more careful deliberate thinking
  • C) Research on debiasing shows consistently modest effects; knowing about biases changes one's relationship to them but does not fully override their operation
  • D) Cognitive biases only affect attraction judgments in laboratory settings, not real-world attraction

Correct answer: C Explanation: The debiasing literature generally finds that knowledge of cognitive biases produces small to moderate changes in behavior at best. Biases that operate in System 1 — automatically, before deliberate reflection is possible — are particularly resistant to being overridden by propositional knowledge.

Question 12 (Short Answer)

Dr. Okafor and Dr. Reyes interpret the cross-cultural findings from their preliminary cognitive bias data differently. Summarize each researcher's interpretive stance and explain what broader theoretical position each represents.

Model answer: Reyes interprets the consistent appearance of cognitive shortcuts across all cultural samples as evidence of evolved, species-typical adaptations — biological heuristics that culture modulates but does not create. Okafor acknowledges the universal presence of shortcuts but argues that even modest cross-cultural variation in their magnitude and direction is theoretically meaningful, suggesting these biases are not fixed adaptations but flexible patterns shaped by cultural institutions, media environments, and relational norms. Reyes represents an evolutionary psychological framework; Okafor represents a cultural-constructionist feminist framework. Neither denies both universality and cultural variation — they disagree about which is more theoretically fundamental.