Positive affect as a moderator of liking effects on trust and attraction Ramadhar Singh, 1 Jocelyn Shu Qing Teng, 2 Naureen Bhullar 3 and Krithiga Sankaran 3 1 Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India, 2 National University of Singapore, Singapore, and 3 Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bangalore, India Attitude similarity effects on attraction appear to be mediated sequentially by positive affect, inferred attraction, and trust. That is, the first two supposedly distal mediators influence each other in building trust, a mediator proximal to attraction. However, the correlational nature of data reported heretofore precludes definitive conclusions about sequential dependency between the two distal mediators. In the research reported, therefore, the authors manipulated positive affect in the participants (Time 1) and liking of the partner for them (Time 2), and measured trust before attraction. As predicted, liking effects on trust and attraction were stronger when positive affect in the participants was high than when it was low. Importantly, the interaction effect in trust fully mediated the interaction effect in attraction. Key words: affect, causal order, inferred attraction, sequential dependency, trust. Introduction In everyday life, people tend to judge “favorably those who are most similar to them ...” (Pfeffer, 2013, p. 275). Those who are similar to their peers and supervi- sors vis- a-vis alma mater, gender, nationality, race and/ or religion in organizations also do well in their careers (Schaubroeck & Lam, 2002). Such observations support the phenomenon of similarity–attraction (Byrne, 1961). In a typical attitude similarity–attraction experiment, participants first complete an attitude survey. When they arrive for a later interaction session, they examine a bogus attitude survey that includes responses similar to or dissimilar from the participant’s own responses to the first attitude survey (i.e., predictor). Participants examine the survey and judge the partner along attraction items (i.e., criterion). Expressed attraction is usually higher to a similar partner than a dissimilar one (Byrne, 1961). Although the similarity–attraction relation seems sim- ple, the processes underlying it are not. Thus, the vari- ables mediating the similarity–attraction relation are of as much theoretical interest today (Singh, Chen, & Wegener, 2014; Singh et al., 2015, 2017b) as they were in the first decade of the attraction paradigm (Aronson & Worchel, 1966; Byrne, 1971; Byrne & Clore, 1967; Byrne & Griffitt, 1966). Byrne and Clore (1970) pro- posed that attitude similarity induces positive affect in the participants, which gets associated with the partner. This view was then supported by two chains of the cau- sal evidence: (i) incidental affect induced by heat, movies, and/or crowding determines interpersonal attrac- tion (Bell & Baron, 1974; Gouaux, 1971; Griffitt, 1970; Griffitt & Veit, 1971), and (ii) attitude similarity influ- ences affect in the participants (Clore & Gormly, 1974; Singh, 1974, 1975). In an alternative view, similar and dissimilar attitudes signal the partner’s liking and disliking for the partici- pant, respectively. Given that people tend to like those who appear to like them (Gouldner, 1960), interpersonal attraction can also be a mere reciprocation of the attrac- tion inferred from similar attitudes (Aronson & Worchel, 1966). This view has three lines of evidence. First, per- sonal evaluations, including liking for the participant, by the partner influence attraction (Bell & Baron, 1974; Byrne & Griffitt, 1966; Byrne & Rhamey, 1965; Clore & Baldridge, 1970; Singh, 1974, 1975; Singh, Goh, Sankaran, & Bhullar, 2016). Second, the similarity– attraction relation is stronger with the participants who infer attraction than with those who infer ambivalence of the partner toward themselves (Insko et al., 1973; Exper- iment 2). Finally, the similarity–attraction relation is sta- tistically weakened when inferred attraction is used as another predictor of attraction (Condon & Crano, 1988). Thus, inferred attraction may be regarded as a mediator of attitude similarity effects on attraction. To Byrne (1971), however, inferred attraction is an instance of a more important agreement with the partici- pant’s own positive self-attitude than with other non- personal attitudes toward environment protection and immigration (cf. Byrne & Griffitt, 1966; Byrne & Rhamey, 1965). In this research, we investigated depen- dency of inferred attraction on incidental affect in Correspondence: Ramadhar Singh, Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad University, GICT Building, Central Campus, Navrangapura, Ahmedabad 380009, Gujarat, India. Email: singhr@ahduni.edu.in Received 8 June 2017; accepted 7 September 2017. © 2017 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2017), , – DOI: 10.1111/ajsp.12192 Asian Journal of Social Psychology