The Creator Psychology Glossary

Attitude homophily

What it is

When you watch someone online and think "she sees this the way I do," you're noticing that the two of you seem to share opinions. That's about what someone believes, not how they look or where they grew up. The perception that another person is similar to you is called homophily, and the version about shared opinions is called attitude homophily.

Researchers measure it separately from the other kinds of similarity. In 1975, McCroskey, Richmond and Daly built a set of questionnaire scales for perceived similarity and found that people's answers sorted into four separate groups: attitude, morality, appearance and background. So a viewer can feel that a creator thinks like them without feeling that the creator looks like them, and the scales can tell those two apart.

The study

In 2020, Karina Sokolova and Hajer Kefi published a study of the audiences of four beauty influencers who were popular in France on YouTube and Instagram. They looked at what went along with the one-sided sense of connection a viewer feels toward someone they watch, which researchers call parasocial interaction. They also looked at how believable viewers found the influencer, which is called credibility.

They tested three possible contributors side by side: attitude homophily, physical attractiveness, and a third measure the authors call social attractiveness, which is about how socially appealing viewers found the influencer rather than how good-looking. They also checked whether their results changed with the participants' ages or with which of the four influencers was being rated.

Attitude homophily was positively related to the sense of connection. Physical attractiveness, in the authors' own word "surprisingly," showed a negative relationship or no relationship at all. And both the sense of connection and credibility were positively related to whether viewers intended to buy what the influencer recommended.

Beauty is a category where appearance would seem like the obvious draw, and in this study it wasn't the thing that went with feeling connected.

Where this stops applying

The paper reports relationships between measures rather than an experiment where one thing was changed on purpose, so it shows that shared opinions and connection went together. It can't show that one caused the other. It covers one category, beauty, and one country's audience.

Attractiveness doesn't come out the same way in every study, either. In a 2011 experiment by Tilo Hartmann and Charlotte Goldhoorn, viewers who rated a performer as more attractive reported a stronger sense of interaction with her. The two studies measured different things in different settings, so the fair reading is that the evidence on attractiveness is mixed, and the evidence on shared opinions is the more consistent part of the 2020 result.

What to do with it

State the opinion you and your audience share in plain words, in the content itself. If your audience thinks most posting advice is guesswork, say that you think so too and why, then teach the thing. That's the variable this study connected to how close viewers felt.

Next step

The Audience Psychology Snapshot reads the language in a bio or caption and tells you who that language actually attracts, who you meant to reach, and the gap between them, with three rewrites. It's a way to check whether the opinions you meant to share are coming through. It's at datapsych.net/audience-snapshot.

Sources