How Unconscious Processing Affects Relationships

Walk into a room full of strangers and you are bound to instantly find people attractive, approachable, off-putting, strange or hostile. All this, without even speaking to them and without knowing anything at all about them. How do we make these assumptions about people?

Gut Feelings

Very often people talk about ‘gut feelings’ when it comes to the evaluation of strangers.

“I just don’t know… I had the strangest feeling about her.”

“Something about him makes me uneasy.”

“As soon as I saw her I knew we were going to get on.”

Statements like these are commonplace, and with recent advances in psychological knowledge, we are beginning to come to some understanding about what drives our evaluative strategies when meeting new people.

Heuristics

If we had to consciously evaluate all our new acquaintances it would take a very long time and involve the brain in a lot of heavy processing. We would have to go through a long check list of our likes and dislikes, relate these to our current situation, needs and wants, and then score each person on a variety of scales in order to make a sensible assessment. Luckily for us (or perhaps not so luckily) the brain is innately lazy and prefers to do as little work as possible. Therefore, it has developed a heuristic system that short-cuts the whole process.

Heuristics is a problem-solving technique in which the most appropriate solution of many (usually found by experience of similar problems) is chosen later to speed up results.

We already have a good deal of experience of people we like, and they tend to conform to our patterns and expectations. We have come to understand that our evaluations of new people are based, largely, on our existing models of people we already like.

Questions

The assessments we make of people are based on factors such as:

• Their suitability as a mate.

• The way they dress.

• Personal appearance.

• Race.

Thus we might start to like someone simply because they look like someone else that we already like. If you are unconsciously reminded of a favourite aunt, you will ascribe her qualities to someone who looks like her. An uncle who was mean will also influence your feelings if you meet someone who reminds you of him. Psychological experiments have shown that we are attracted to people who are like us; this explains why groups of goths, hippies, punks and bankers tend to stick together.