Do Opposites Attract?

Do opposites attract? Am I more likely to be interested in someone with the same similarities or someone different than myself? In order to answer these questions, or at least address them, we will look at a study published in 2007 titled “Multiple Mediators of the Attitude Similarity-Attraction Relationship: Dominance of Inferred Attraction and Subtlety of Affect,” by Ramadhar Singh, Sherie E-Lin Yeo, Patrick K. F. Lin, and Lydia Tan. According to the research done by the National University of Singapore, the old wives’ tale stating that, “opposites attract,” may only be a myth handed down generation to generation. The study attempted to answer the previously posed questions and add to the knowledge and understanding of social psychology. Two experiments were conducted simultaneously using students of a government-run, junior college in Singapore. The age of the subjects was between 16 and 17 years old. For the first experiment thirty men and thirty women were randomly selected by college authorities. Attitude was the primary variable in the first experiment and affect of participant using six bipolar adjectives (sad-happy, negative-positive, low-high, bad-good, unpleasant-pleasant, and uncomfortable-comfortable) ranging from 1-7. To begin students were given a time and place to meet for the experiment. After arrival, subjects were put into separated cells and given an hour to fill out a specially designed booklet surveying their attitude. Twenty-four attitude questions were asked. Beneath each question seven boxes were presented symbolizing the numbers 1 (the lowest) to 7 (the highest) based on agreement and disagreement. Each question was carefully picked to elicit a strong response in the subject such as; smoking, belief in God, family finance, divorce, premarital sex, migration, and so forth. After subjects had completed their booklet they were given the necessary information about the next meeting. Experimenters went to work classifying strong