How context interferes with similarity-attraction between customers and service providers

According to the similarity-attraction effect, customers should prefer service providers who are perceived to be similar; yet cosmetic features such as visible tattoos are often prohibited in professional settings, suggesting that they do not provide an advantage for service providers. This research explores the extent to which contextual factors interfere with the similarity-attraction effect for any particular cosmetic feature. The findings of three experimental studies demonstrate that sharing a cosmetic feature with a customer is not enough to elicit the similarity-attraction effect; a shared cosmetic feature must also be (1) salient, (2) unique among a set of service providers, and (3) the only salient shared cosmetic feature. The implication is that the similarity-attraction effect will be over-estimated in controlled experiments that do not account for contextual information.