What Type of First Impressions Spark Unique Attraction? |
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Dominant, agentic behavior boosts popularity in networking or group settings.
Warm, communal behavior triggers unique attraction and stronger individual connections.
Both agentic and communal traits make people generally liked, but only communal drives unique preference.
When meeting someone for the first time, we experience some perceptions immediately—such as whether or not we like them. If we do, there is a difference between being generally impressed by them and feeling unique attraction. Both forms of liking are based on the way they behave, since even during a first meeting in an interpersonal setting, our attraction to someone else is based on both verbal and nonverbal behavior.
For people seeking to make a good impression in settings such as networking or campaigning, research by Martje Buss et al. (2024) emphasizes the importance of dominant behavior in creating popularity.1 They note that people high in extraversion are often perceived as more popular both in person and within virtual group interactions, a result they suggest can be explained in part by the fact that extraversion includes a display of more dominant behaviors,........