Is sharing a dislike linked to liking a stranger more than sharing a liking is?

Details

The research examined whether agreeing about someone else relates to closeness differently depending on whether the shared opinion is negative or positive. In two surveys, participants’ open-ended accounts tended to recall more shared negative than positive opinions about other people with their closest friends. These recollections alone cannot show that shared dislike caused those friendships to become close.

The experiment examined liking for a stranger. A shared negative opinion of a target person predicted liking for the stranger more strongly than a shared positive opinion did, but only when the opinions were weak. The abstract therefore does not support extending this finding to strongly held opinions, and it gives no effect size or sample details.

Participants themselves said that sharing positive opinions about others would be especially effective in promoting closeness. The authors suggested possible explanations for the contrasting finding, such as creating a sense of “us” and “them,” boosting self-esteem or revealing information about each other. These are proposed explanations, not mechanisms established by the reported findings.