Attraction, aggression, fairness and power between people

Key ideas

Attraction and familiarity

Repeated, responsive contact tends to increase liking. In live interaction experiments, strangers who talked for longer were more attracted to each other, partly because they saw the other as responsive, felt more comfortable and felt they knew the other better.

Aggression

Berkowitz's reformulation of the frustration-aggression hypothesis holds that frustrations and other aversive events produce aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect, and that how a person interprets a thwarting can change how unpleasant it feels.

Organizational justice

Fairness at work has four related dimensions: distributive (the outcomes), procedural (how decisions are made), interpersonal (dignity and respect) and informational (the explanations given). A meta-analysis of 183 studies found that each adds to fairness perceptions and relates to outcomes such as commitment, withdrawal and performance.

Internet communication

Text strips away tone, gesture and emphasis. In experiments, people overestimated how well their intended tone, such as sarcasm or humor, came across by e-mail, because they heard the message in their own voice and could not easily take the reader's view.

Empathy and power

Therapist empathy predicts better therapy outcome across orientations. Power pulls the other way: in experiments, a sense of high power made people less inclined to adopt others' perspectives and read others' emotions less accurately, a risk for anyone with authority over clients, trainees or staff.

Worked example

A community agency must cut every clinician's paid hours by ten percent for six months after losing a grant. The director asks a consulting psychologist how to announce and carry out the cut without losing the team's trust in leadership.

1. Separate the dimensions of justice: the outcome (distributive justice) is fixed, so attention goes to what leadership still controls: process, explanation and treatment.
2. Strengthen procedural justice: apply one rule to everyone, state the criteria openly, and give staff a voice in how the reduced hours are scheduled.
3. Strengthen informational and interpersonal justice: explain the reason in person with the real figures, answer questions honestly and deliver the news with courtesy.
4. Deliver the news face to face and use writing only to confirm details, since people who write a message usually judge its tone clearer than its readers find it.

When an outcome cannot change, fair process, honest explanation and respectful treatment still shape how people judge it.