Attraction to Alternatives during Romantic Relationships: The Role of Couple Personality Similarity

Abstract

Although love relationships promote well-being, the development and maintenance of the relationships may not always be smooth and successful. One of the factors that may hinder the process is attraction to alternative partners. Past research has shown that couple personality similarity influences relationship quality. Few studies, however, have examined how the couples’ actual and perceived personality similarity will predict attraction to alternatives during dating relationships. To fill in the research gaps, two experimental studies were conducted. Study One investigated how couple actual and perceived personality similarity predicted attraction to alternatives in two relationship contexts (satisfied vs. dissatisfied). To extend the findings, Study Two examined the causality between perceived personality similarity and attraction to alternatives in both sexes. Specifically, both the profile scores (Pearson correlations between two partners’ scores across all personality traits) and absolute difference scores (the absolute difference between two partners’ mean scores on a given trait) were calculated for actual and perceived similarity in Study One. With a sample of 189 pairs of university dating couples and the employment of dyadic statistical methods, such as the Actor-Partner-Interdependence-Modeling, Study One showed: 1) couple actual similarity in Extraversion negatively predicted attraction to alternatives among females only in the dissatisfied condition; 2) relationship satisfaction did not show significant effects on perceived personality similarity; 3) male perception profile accuracy had a positive association with male attraction to alternatives in the satisfied condition; 4) for specific traits, female perception accuracy in Conscientiousness showed a negative association with male attraction to alternatives during conflicting situations, whereas female perception accuracy in Extraversion showed a positive association with female attraction to alternatives during negative dating relationships; and 5) couple perception similarity in Conscientiousness was negatively correlated with male attraction to alternatives. With 89 pairs of university dating couples, Study Two showed that males in the “similarity” condition reported significantly lower levels of attraction to alternatives than did their counterparts in the “dissimilarity” condition. However, the perceived similarity/dissimilarity in each trait had a non-significant effect on male attraction to alternatives, which was consistent with findings on male perception profile accuracy in Study One. Accordingly, this research suggests that perceived similarity is important for males’ attraction to alternatives. Overall, the findings in the two studies suggest that the relationships between personality similarity and attraction to alternatives are different across gender, domains of personality, and types of similarity. The implications for theories and practices are discussed.

Date of Award	29 Jun 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Sam Shengquan YE (Supervisor)