Liking and Disliking: Sketch of an Alternative View

Abstract

Even though we acquire more negative information about people as we get to know them better and negative information has a disproportionately high weight, our liking for a friend does not automatically diminish with continued acquaintance. It is difficult to reconcile this fact with the commonly held assumption that liking-disliking is a unidimensional judgment. An alternative view is proposed in which liking and disliking are seen as separate judgments. The several premises are: 1) the criteria for liking and disliking are distinct; 2) friendship choices are made from a set of eligibles; 3) people are rejected from the set of eligibles on the basis of dislike criteria; 4) friends are chosen from the set of eligibles on the basis of like criteria; 5) the like criteria are likely to be context specific. Analysis of dislike judgments suggests a differentiation of negative information into disliked and disfavored attributes. Given this distinction, the fact of nondiminishing friendship poses no difficulty. The analysis of liking judgments suggests no substantive additions to what is already known about like criteria. It does, however, point up a nontrivial methodological problem with traditional measures of liking--a difficulty associated with the failure to take the context specificity of like criteria into account.