Researchers learn what attracts us to particular people.

It's simple to appreciate someone just because they enjoy the same music as you do or to despise someone because of their beliefs about how the Earth is shaped.

The inclination to evaluate someone based solely on one trait is explained by a straightforward psychological mechanism, according to recent research, demonstrating how unjustified presumptions influence the laws of attraction.

Human relationships are generally regulated by the so-called similarity-attraction effect, which states that we tend to like people who are just like us. While the old adage that opposites attract may hold true for magnetic poles and electrostatic charges, it does not apply to human relationships. Therefore, the types of people we identify with greatly depend on how we define ourselves.

The authors of the current study claim that self-essentialist reasoning, which is the idea that we have an innate essence that defines who we are, is what allows us to conceptualize our identities.

According to research author Charles Chu of Boston University, if we had to paint a picture of our sense of self, it would be this nugget, an almost magical core inside that emanates out and causes what we can see and observe about people and ourselves."

"Believing that people have an underlying essence allows us to assume or infer that when we see someone who shares a single characteristic, they must share my entire deeply rooted essence, as well," he argues. The researchers enlisted 2,290 participants for a series of experiments to validate this hypothesis.

Participants initially answered a questionnaire meant to gauge the potency of their self-essentialist justification. After that, they were asked to express their thoughts towards a fictitious character named Jamie depending on their beliefs regarding abortion, the death penalty, and gun ownership.

As expected, those with higher self-essentialist thinking were more likely to find Jamie attractive when their own opinions aligned with his.

The participants in a second experiment were asked to estimate the number of dots on a screen, and the researchers subsequently classified them as either over- or under-estimators. Amazingly, the findings showed that when informed that they shared a propensity to overestimate or underestimate, persons with a greater belief in their own essential core were more likely to feel favorable about Jamie.

"I discovered that people who are higher in their belief that they have an essence are more likely to be attracted to these similar others as opposed to people who have lower levels of this belief, both with pretty meaningful dimensions of similarity and with random, minimal similarities," said the researcher

The participants in the next two experiments were specifically informed by the researchers that personality and artistic taste are unrelated. It's interesting to note that participants were less likely to strongly identify with people who enjoyed the same kind of art as they did.

those were more inclined to have pleasant feelings towards those who like the same artworks as them when they were told the contrary is true.

The study's authors summarise their findings by stating that self-essentialist reasoning leads us to "project many of our own attributes onto another person with whom we share a single attribute."

"This belief and the thought process it facilitates are the basis for the warm feeling we get towards someone we just met who has something in common with us, that sense that this person is my kind of person and sees things as I do," they go on to say.

The researchers write, "On a good day, self-essentialist reasoning helps us see a little more of ourselves in others, facilitating the uniquely human capacity for social connection."

In a negative light, this concept could help the more sinister aspects of humanity socially exclude others by drawing lines between us and them.