The Social Animal

I finished up chapter seven
Chapter seven dealt with what makes people attracted to other people. The author first talks about the effects of praise and favors. Praise and favors are effective to some extent. If the person benefiting from the favors and/or praise suspects the favor-doer has ulterior motives, the efforts are neutralized or counterproductive. People enjoy receiving rewards for little cost. If the favor-doer's motives appear to be clean, praise and favors can have positive effects.
Then he talks about personal attributes. The main point of the section of the chapter is that we tend to like people who are nearly perfect. We would like a highly competent person who we have seen make a mistake more than a highly competent person who we have never seen do wrong. The seemingly perfect nature of the second person puts him higher on a pedestal, reducing some of his attractiveness. He also talks about how we tend to like beautiful people more than ugly people. He discusses how relying on outward beauty can deter us from find the beauty within and what not.
Finally he introduces another theory, the gain-loss theory, that talks about attractiveness. Its main point is that we would be more likely to like somone who started out with a negative attitude toward us and gained a more positive veiw than someone who liked us all along. In the same way, we would dislike someone more who started out liking us and grew to dislike us.
This was a fairly informative chapter and I wasn't disappointed by the information provided.

TOTAL READING TIME: 10 hr.

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