The Affiliative Attribute

affiliative is one of four quadrants in the system. It is an attribute that all people posess to some degree or another. It is also a mode of voluntary behavior, and a type of involuntary behavioral response.

A person is affiliative when he affiliates himself with others by altering his personality or behavior to be more like the other person or people.

There are two types of affiliative behavior: conscious and unconscious.

Conscious affiliative behavior happens when people deliberately change their attitude, political position, reactions, assertiveness, politeness or any of dozens of other personality attributes in order to fit better with other people. Usually this is for mutual benefit because it avoids conflict.

However, even if there is no conscious affiliation, and even when an indivudual consciously tries to avoid changing their behavior or personality, affiliation still takes place. It takes place at a rate that differs from one person to another and this rate depends on the strength of the person's affiliative attribute.

The phenomenon is very much like the tendency for a person to pick up an accent when they spend a lot of time talking with people who speak that accent.

This issue comes up a lot in heterosexual relationships based on polar attraction [22]. See the gender page for more about this.

[22]: Deida, The Way of the Superior Man, chapter 22

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2018 Aug 27.

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