| Abstract: | Walster, Walster, Piliavin, and Schmidt (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, 26, 113–121) found that a hard-to-get woman was liked only if she was hard-to-get for other men but easy-to-get for the subject. They suggested that the subjects liked this type of woman because of the socially desirable personality characteristics they attributed to her. A second determinant of liking is proposed in the present study. It concerns the effect of a person's evaluation of a subject on the subject's self-esteem. It was predicted that there would be a positive relationship between changes in the subject's self-esteem and liking for the evaluator. The results demonstrated that this determinant, as well as the one that Walster et al. suggested, is important in understanding the type of opposite-sex person that men and women find most attractive. These results, and the differences between the Walster et al. and the present studies, were discussed in terms of the relative impact of the two determinants in laboratory and real-life situations. |
