Discuss Psychological research which has been carried out into interpersonal attraction

Most "Average" participants with "ugly" partners didn't want another date or rate their partners highly. "Attractive" participants with "Attractive" partners were most likely to have another date.

Walster and Berschied concluded that physical attractiveness is the key factor in deciding who 18 year old Americans want to go out with and the more attractive the person, the more they would be sought after. However, the opposite is also true, they uglier the person, the less likely they were to be sought after.

This study led to the formation of the "Matching Hypothesis" which, states, "People are using attractiveness as a measure of forming a relationship. People of a similar attractiveness seem to find a match."

However, the actual procedure that Walster and Berschied carried out has its flaws. The main one of these is that the actual matching of participants may have been flawed in the first place for two reasons.

* The participants initially had to fill in a questionnaire about themselves on the basis of their interests. In this case, social desirability effect may have played a part in their responses as, they were trying to "look good" in order to impress the experimenters.

* Also, the actual rating of the participants was performed by the experimenters leading to individual differences occurring. What may be "ugly" to one person may be "average" to another individual.

A second flaw in the experimental design is that the rating of participants may have caused them psychological harm as well as the use of deception. Both of these are against the British Psychological Society's (BPS) ethical guidelines for experimental design.

A further BPS guideline broken by Walster and Berschied was the "anonymity" criterion as the questionnaires weren't truly anonymous.

Overall, the time span for the judgement on a person to be made was too short and the experiment itself lacks ecological validity as, only 18-year-old Americans were studied. No cross-cultural differences in relationships were taken into account within the context of this investigation.

Later research focused on the balance theory which states that "People like to have a clear, ordered and consistent view of the world so that all parts fit together, if we agree with our friends and disagree with our enemies, then we are in a state of balance" (Heider 46, Newcomb 53)

The balance theory suggests that relationship formation is based on similarity of views rather than merely physical factors. A study by Byrne (71) who asked participants to fill in a questionnaire. Several weeks later, the same participants were given a second questionnaire completed by another person and asked to say whether they liked or disliked that person based on their views. Byrne found a strong positive correlation between similarity of attitude and liking.

However, since this experiment is only correlational, it doesn't show cause and effect. Also, since they didn't meet the person in question it could be difficult to show that the individual made a truly fair and considered judgement.

In contrast, the sociobiological theory argues that it's plausible to believe that relationship formation is an evolutionary response. You could argue that men form relationships with attractive women as they see them as having a greater chance of producing viable offspring than older ones. It's also plausible to argue that women form relationships with men to ensure the economic and emotional survival of their offspring.

Evidence supporting this theory is provided by Buss (89) who found that these gender differences exist cross culturally. He presented participants from 37 countries with a questionnaire about choosing a marriage partner. He found that women in all cultures that were studied were more selective and evaluated their potential partner on a number of criteria. Women were also more likely to look emphasise the money earning potential and status of the male whilst males tended to emphasise physical attractiveness and youth as being more important when looking for a potential partner.

However, the sociobiological theory is an evolutionary approach and thus, has very little evidence from the past supporting it. Therefore, it lacks time validity.

Duck (95) has criticised research into relationship formation for the following reasons;

* The research that has already been conducted isn't representative of the population as a whole

* Few longitudinal studies have been carried out

* Few studies have considered how culture affects the formation of relationships

* There has been very little research focusing on the formation of relationships of gay's and lesbians

Therefore, relationship formation is more complex that previously thought and as a result, further research (focusing on both cross cultural differences and relationship formation between gay/lesbians) is required before the process of relationship formation can be fully explained.