ABSTRACT
Michael Sunnafrank’s review of the literature on attitude similarity and interpersonal attraction is a story about a paradigm that will not die. It has been more than 20 years since Byrne (1969) wrote the first chapter of the story by proposing that similarity leads to attraction. In the begin- ning, the empirical relation between attitudinal similarity and attraction seemed so conclusively supported by experimental evidence that there was, in Fishbein and Ajzen’s (1975) words, “little question about [it]” (p. 263). Eventually Byrne (1971) attributed paradigmatic status to his hypothesis. The importance of the “attraction paradigm” was reinforced by Berger (1975), who claimed that “one of the most robust relationships in all of the behavioral sciences is that which exists between perceived attitudinal similarity and interpersonal attraction” (p. 281), and by Berscheid and Walster’s (1983) unqualified conclusion that “people are attracted to those who share their attitudes” (p. 88).
