Presence of Others’ Effect on Behavior & Interpersonal Attraction

1- The presence of others can impact people’s behavior in many ways. For example, social facilitation is a process where the presence of others causes you to perform better, but only on tasks that are easy for you; during tasks that are difficult, the presence of others causes you to perform worse. Another way people’s behavior is impacted by the presence of others is social loafing, when people are put into a group to complete a task, each individual will perform less than they would if they were working alone.
Deindividuation is another example, where being part of a group causes a person to lose their sense of individuality and have a reduction of constraints against deviant behavior. 2- Three factors that increase interpersonal attraction are the matching hypothesis, reciprocity, and the hard-to-get effect. The matching hypothesis states that people are attracted to those who are equal or similar in physical attractiveness; having this balance allows both people to feel deserving of the relationship and stable in it.
Reciprocity is an equal exchange of what we give and receive, for example, we like those who like us; if someone is attracted to you and always very nice to you, you’ll like and respond to that by being nice back and potentially being attracted to them as well. The hard-to-get effect is having the tendency to prefer people who are more closed off and selective with their social choices, rather than those who welcome everyone; so if one person is very picky with whom they date and only date few people, and another person will date anyone and everyone, we will try to date the person who is picky so that we feel that sense of accomplishment.