Interpersonal attraction as a function of sex differences and saliency of verbal and nonverbal information

Abstract

This experiment investigated the effect of receiving verbal and non verbal information on interpersonal attraction. Since women have been reported to give more weight to nonverbal Information and men to verbal information (e.g., Zahn, 1975), it was predicted that when both verbal and nonverbal evaluative cues are presented about another, women's attraction will be more affected by the level of the nonverbal evaluative cue and men's will be more affected by the level of the verbal evaluative cue. Subjects were randomly assigned to 1 of 16 experimental conditions in a 2^ factorial design. The independent variables were: (1) the con federate's sex; (2) the confederate's level of competency (verbal cues); (3) the confederate's level of friendliness (nonverbal cues); and (4) the subject's sex. Competency was varied by written biographic material which showed the confederate to be competent or incompetent. Friendliness was vaileù by a videotaped interview in vhich c or female confederate was friendly or nonfriendly; the confederate's dialogue was standardized. The content and the channel of the stimulus information (i.e., verbal competency and nonverbal friendliness) were purposely confounded in order to appear analogous to realistically encountered stimuli. Both of these conditions were presented to subjects in a counterbalanced order. Subjects rated their attraction toward the confederate on bipolar evaluative adjectives. The results showed that women differed from men by: (1) being more affected by the confederate's level of competency; (2) being more affected by the confederate's nonfriendliness (while liking the friendly confederate