Since Aristotle’s time, it is known that birds of a feather flock together. This adage can be tested by showing that the greater the similarity between attitudes of two persons, the greater is the attraction between them. This simple relationship has been keeping sociologists, social psychologists, and communication scholars busy in understanding how of it since the 1950s. In this seminar, Professor Ramadhar Singh showed that dissimilar attitudes lead to stronger repulsion than similar attitudes lead to attraction particularly when people are cognitively busy. When there are enough cognitive resources, people pay equal attention to dissimilar and similar attitudes, and that attention strategy is translated into equal and opposite dissimilarity-repulsion and similarity-attraction effects.

About the speaker:
Ramadhar Singh was a Lecturer at Patna University (1968-1973), an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1973-1979), and a Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1979-1988). He moved to Singapore in 1988 and retired as a Professor of Psychology from the National University of Singapore in 2010. He spent his sabbatical leave at the University of Rochester and the University of Oxford during 2003-04 and at Purdue University during August through December 2008. During 2010-2016, he was the Distinguished Professor of Management at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He has been a Distinguished University Professor at Ahmedabad University since July 7, 2016. Singh’s passion for research is evinced by his regular publications in prime international journals of applied, developmental, and social psychology and management. In recognition of his unusual and outstanding contributions to psychology, he was elected a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (1992), American Psychological Association (1993), Association for Psychological Science (1993), Society of Personality and Social Psychology (1993), Singapore Psychological Society (1993), and National Academy of Psychology (India) (2008). In December 2013, the Association for Psychological Science included him among Faces and Minds of Psychological Science. In January 2014, he received the Sir J C Bose Memorial Award from the Indian Science Monitor, Chennai. He has been a Consulting Editor of the Review of General Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association since July 2014. In May 2015, he was included in CognoByte, a website on some Top Thinkers in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. In July 2015, he got featured among the Legends of HRD in the Business Manager, a HR Magazine. He is currently Associate Editor of the IIMB Management Review (2010-) and the Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2016-).