The next time you find yourself seated in a roomful of strangers, take a close look at your nearest neighbor. Does he or she resemble you in subtle ways? The answer is most likely yes, according to a recent study published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Although psychologists have long known that humans tend to associate by race, sex and other broad-brush categories, the latest work is the first to suggest that the impulse runs even to the picayune. “Sometimes we either gravitate toward people or away from them not because of a large prejudice but just because there’s something a little bit more—or less—familiar about them,” says Anne Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and a co-author of the study. “Most of these processes are not really conscious.”
To read the full, original article click on this link: Pull Up a Chair: Scientific American
Author:Adam Marcus
