A study was conducted to identify the independent and conjoint influence of attitude similarity and initial interactions on interpersonal attraction to relative strangers. The 124 college students who were participants in the study were informed that they would be working on a project with either an attitudinally similar or dissimilar stranger…

A 5-week study was conducted to examine the acquainting process--changes that occur as a relationship between two strangers develops. Fifty subjects were paired in same sex dyads and were asked to talk to one another once a week for half-hour periods. The unstructured conversations were tape-recorded and questionnaires were administered to the…

Stereotyped impressions of male homosexuals and the underlying importance of sexuality in social attraction and perceptions were investigated. Male (N=80) and female (N=80) college students responded to either an attractive or an unattractive photo of a male stimulus person, who was identified to half of the subjects as a homosexual. Compared to…

The purpose of this research was to determine how interactive style influences effectiveness and interpersonal attraction in groups. After college student volunteers completed the Communicator Style Measure (CSM), 72 subjects were selected from three style profiles and assigned to triads that contained high, mid, and low communication style…

A study was conducted on the relationships between information seeking and individual cognitive structures (both individual cognitive complexity and the constructs used to understand others). Specifically, the study sought to determine how people use questions to reduce the uncertainty of meeting new people in impression-formation interviews. The…

Research on attraction in an interpersonal context has strongly suggested that the more attracted two people are to one another, the more they tend to communicate. This study explored attraction and social interaction patterns at the perceptual level. Eighty male and female graduate students, 40 black and 40 white, completed a two part measure of…

An analysis of interpersonal communication research supports the existence of the notion "communicative style," the method or manner by which an individual interacts with others. Scholars concerned with interpersonal behavior acknowledge that individuals develop habitual styles of interactive behavior that tend to produce optimal…

In an experiment studying the relationship between reciprocity and compensation in dyadic communication, 96 male college students were videotaped during hypothetical problem solving situations. An attitude scale was used to manipulate subjects' impressions of mutual similarity. Time was used to test development in the dependent variables…