Winning Him Over

My boyfriend, after dating for several months, admitted to me that he did not like me when we first met. As I reflect on the time between when I met him and when we started dating, it all makes a bit more sense. I remember meeting him and immediately having a crush. However, I was 14 and a bit ...inept at how to snag a boy. I worked really hard at winning him over -- throwing every move I had at him (all two or so of them). I assumed he was just playing hard to get. Especially when he ended up liking me, I just figured that I was right in my assumption. In social psychology, this affect is called confirmatory hypothesis testing. Confirmatory hypothesis testing happens when we search for information with a specific goal in mind rather than collecting information without bias (Snyder & Swann, 1978). For example, if a person expects someone to have a certain trait, that person will discover that trait by acting in a way that allows the trait to be evident (Zuckerman et al., 1995). I was looking for him to like me, so I only acted in ways that allowed him to show that he did like me.
The primacy effect, however, was the reason that I had to work so hard to get him to like me. The primacy effect means that we weight information collected earlier more heavily than information collected later (Asch, 1946). When I made a bad first impression on my boyfriend, I had to make several good impressions to neutralize the initial impression. Luckily we were in band together, so we had to be around each other all the time. Otherwise, I might be the victim of biased experience sampling which is the tendency to avoid the people we have bad first impressions of never giving them a chance to reconcile themselves and leading us to believe our impression was correct (Denrell, 2005).
Of course this all happened so long ago that I might be using a confirmation bias, the bias to remember information that supports beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them (Darley & Gross, 1983), to support my ideas.

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Darley, J. M., & Gross, P. H. (1983). A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 20-33.

Denrell, J. (2005). Why most people disapprove of me: Experience sampling in impression formation. Psychological Review, 112, 951-978.

Snyder, M., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1978). Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 1202-1212.

Zuckerman, M., Knee, C. R., Hodgins, H. S., & Miyake, K. (1995). Hypothesis confirmation: The joint effect of positive test strategy and acquiescence response set. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 52-60.